Nino Freestyle — Yeifry Severino de la Rosa, born in La Romana on 13 November 1998 — is a Dominican rapper. He came out of the freestyle circuit, which is where his name comes from, and he is one of the few Dominican urban artists who uses the platform to argue about the country rather than only about himself.

The year it carried

He closed 2020 as a worldwide trend, and the Dominican press marked it: the new face of rap in the country. He was in his early twenties and working from La Romana rather than the capital.

El País

El País, subtitled Ley Mordaza, is a protest record aimed squarely at the sitting government. It deals with a police killing of a minor and with what he sees as a failing state, and he released it under his own name with nothing hedged.

Protest rap has a thin tradition in the Dominican Republic. The urban genres here grew commercial fast and stayed there, and a well-known artist releasing a song that names a government is unusual enough that the news programmes covered the release itself as a story. He performs at the Festival Mordaza and describes himself as a social activist alongside the music.

The records

Alongside the rap he works in dembow. Son Mío, cut with Yaisel LM and Boy Wonder CF, is the recent one. Vico C, the Puerto Rican who invented much of what Spanish-language rap became, has appeared publicly with him.