Topo la Máskara, born Juan José Brito Castillo, is a Dominican dembow producer and singer from San Pedro de Macorís. He is better known inside the industry than outside it, for a reason that has to do with who gets named on a record.

The bass line

He produced Tu Maldita Madre for Shelow Shaq. A year later a record called Scooby Doo Pa Pa was released by another Dominican artist, became a worldwide hit, got a Pitbull remix and turned into a dance craze filmed in a dozen countries.

Shelow Shaq and Topo said the bass line under it was theirs. They sued, and the record came off Spotify while the claim was live. The sites that track samples now list the relationship as a matter of record, and the credit panels on the streaming services carry both their names.

That sequence is the most consequential episode in his career, and one that a discography cannot record. A dembow instrumental is made in a bedroom by one person, circulates without paperwork, and reappears under somebody else’s name; whether the maker is ever named again depends entirely on whether he is willing to go to court about it.

There is a coda. In 2019 he cut a record with a Brazilian artist that sampled Scooby Doo Pa Pa — the track that had sampled him. Dembow eats itself and keeps moving, and he has never pretended otherwise.

Producer first

He sings his own records too. La 9 is the one he brands himself with, and Hey Yo, Rehab, Muévelo, Trumpets, Sola, Cumbia, Playa y Sol, Me Gusta, Mejor Sin Ti, Joseando and Me La Sube are all his.

What is striking about the catalogue is how far outside dembow it goes. There is guaracha on it, and cumbia, and a record filed as tribal house. The Dominican producers of his generation are working the same electronic dance circuit as everyone else in Latin America, and the genre labels stopped being useful some time ago.

San Pedro

San Pedro de Macorís is not a dembow town in the way the Santo Domingo barrios are. It is a sugar town and a baseball town, and its musical export has historically been the guloya drums of the cocolo community rather than anything urban.

That he came out of there and ended up with his work inside a record playing in Miami and Madrid says something about how the genre actually spreads: not through a scene or a label, but through a file that travels faster than the person who made it.