Kiko el Crazy, born José Alberto Rojas Peralta, is a Dominican rapper, singer and composer from Los Mina. He is one of the artists who carried dembow out of the Dominican barrio and onto records made in Los Angeles, and he did it without changing how he talks.

Los Mina

He started around music at ten, learning to play a little of several instruments, and took guitar lessons at twelve. Monkey Black was the rapper who marked him. Un To Pa To, in 2009, was popular in his own neighbourhood and nowhere else, which is where a dembow career normally begins and usually ends.

The first professional recognition came for writing rather than performing: in 2011 he was nominated at the Premios Casandra as a composer, for Prende la Hookah, which Tulile recorded. He was also on Lápiz Conciente’s label early on.

The year everything moved

2019 is the hinge. Trucho, with Rochy RD; the Bajé con Trenza remix, where Ozuna put him and El Cherry Scom on a Puerto Rican record; then Bájale, La Pampara, Asicalao, Tic Toc, Popi, Fue Por Ti, Yo Doy Nota, and Sube la Bocina, which gathered Shelow Shaq, La Manta, El Cherry Scom, El Pope and Lolo en el Micrófono on one track.

The Popi remix in 2020 added El Alfa and Farruko. Se Acabó la Cuarentena, with Jowell y Randy, went to number one on Spotify — a Dominican dembow record about the end of lockdown, arriving exactly when the audience needed it.

The albums

Llegó el Domi, in 2022, is the debut album, and its guest list reads like an argument about where dembow belongs: Ñengo Flow, Farruko, Darell, Arcángel, Zion y Lennox, Jowell y Randy, will.i.am. Latina, the track with will.i.am, is the clearest statement of it.

Pila’e Teteo followed in 2023 and turned the other way, filling the record with the Dominican field itself — Bulin 47, El Alfa, Flow 28, Angel Dior, El Fother, Chimbala, Mala Rodríguez, Braulio Fogón, Yomel el Meloso. Pitchfork reviewed it, which for a dembow album made in Santo Domingo was not routine.

At the Premios Juventud that year he was nominated twice, for Cuca and for Pichirry with El Alfa, and won neither; he was nominated as dembow artist of the year at the Premios Tu Música Urbano in the same season.

The character

Part of what he sells is a persona — the loud clothes, the runway appearance at New York Fashion Week in 2023, the deliberate excess. Underneath it is a writer who has been putting Dominican street vocabulary into records for fifteen years and refusing to translate any of it.