El Mayor Clásico is a Dominican dembow artist, born Emmanuel Reyes on 9 November 1990. He came out of Las Cañitas, in Santo Domingo Norte, and is one of the names dembow was built on.

Four thousand pesos

He tells the story of his first paid show as an accounting problem. He was paid four thousand pesos on the Friday. On the Saturday he spent two thousand of it on CDs and a T-shirt, because Sunday’s show paid nothing but he knew the crowd would be big, and if the crowd was going to be big he had to be dressed for it and have something to sell them.

That is the whole economics of Dominican street music in one weekend: the record is a business card, the clothes are the advertising, and the free show is the investment.

Getting heard

The first single, Los Gucci, went nowhere. Clásico is the one that found an audience, and it gave him the name he kept. Labels came and went before Gran Velero Records signed him.

What he grew up on was Puerto Rican — Daddy Yankee, Tego Calderón — and what he made was the Dominican answer to it. Dembow takes the same lineage and strips it down further: faster, cruder, built on one loop, written in the language of the barrio it comes from. Choki Choki, Minor Ratata, El Maíz, Toy Alante, Usted Jevito Soy.

Everyone at once

Dembow is a collaborative genre by construction, and his credits read like a map of it. Envidioso put him with Secreto El Famoso Biberón, Ceky Viciny and Bulova; No La Tiene with Shelow Shaq and El Poeta Callejero; and he has worked across the years with Shadow Blow, Rochy RD and Nino Freestyle.

He has also gone outside the genre for it. Amanecío paired him with Elvis Martínez — a bachata voice from an entirely different decade of Dominican music — and La 23 took him onto a record with the Puerto Rican Farruko.

Still working

The output has not slowed. Bailar, Tú No Le Ha Llegao’, Los Kilos + Chiquito, Dime Tú and Eso came in a single stretch, and Personalidad, Tamo Lindo, El Hijo de Dios and Bien Happy followed on Chosen Few.

Fifteen years in, he is one of the few from dembow’s first wave still releasing at the pace the genre demands.