Paramba is a Dominican dembow singer, born Johan Pavel Domínguez. For a stretch in the middle of the last decade he was one of the leading names in Dominican urban music.

Con el Cuello Pa’ Trá

The song arrived in March 2013 and went straight into the bars, the discotheques and the drinks — the roadside spots where Dominican hits are actually decided — across the capital and the provinces. He described it himself as a catchy fusion of dembow and dancehall, and said the point of the production was to make it sound unlike everything else.

That is a producer’s answer rather than a singer’s, and it is the correct one for the genre. Dembow tracks are separated by a few seconds of texture, and a record that sounds like the last one does not get played.

Que Se Mueran de Envidia

The follow-up was bigger and it is the one people name first. A decade later El Caribe listed it among the Dominican songs that were inescapable and then quietly stopped being played, in a piece whose subject was exactly that: what happens to an artist after the hit.

The paper is blunt about the arc — he was one of the leaders of the urban scene, and after several hits his presence in the media fell away.

Still working

He has not stopped. A remix of Le Gusta Bailar with Julito RD and Pegao Flow Nueva Yol with El Tory are recent, and he still plays shows.

Dominican dembow has a short memory and a fast turnover, and the list of people who were briefly at the front of it is long. Being on that list is not nothing: for two or three years his songs were what the country was playing.