Toxic Crow is a Dominican rapper, songwriter and record-label owner from Los Mina. He came up in the generation that opened Dominican rap and he has stayed at the centre of it for a quarter of a century, mostly by building things other people can work inside.

Los Mina

He started in a crew of street MCs from the barrio, Punto Rojo among them, in the years when Dominican rap had no industry to join. That generation had to make its own: Ito Ogamy was already a decade in, Vakeró was coming up in San Pedro, and the whole thing ran on cassettes, corners and reputation.

What separates him from most of that cohort is that when the crew broke up he did not simply go solo. He built a label.

Complot Records

Complot Records came out of the Los Mina crew and became one of the two or three names that define Dominican rap in the two-thousands. Accounts differ on when exactly it was founded — 2000, 2003, 2012 all appear — probably because a crew, a label and a company are three different things that happened at three different times.

It is not a shell. He records inside it, and he films himself doing it: the Escuela del Complot sessions put unknown young rappers in his studio with him, and the footage goes up on the same channel as everything else. In a genre where almost nobody trains anybody, that is a real transfer.

Máquina Letal is the album of his that circulated furthest. Ultimátum was aimed squarely at Lápiz Conciente, which in Dominican rap is less a quarrel than a form.

The book

In August 2020 he published Cómo Hacerse Millonario Pensando, eighty-three pages under his own legal name, with a Dominican ISBN and an audiobook edition. Diario Libre covered the launch.

A Dominican street rapper writing a book about how to think your way to money is not a departure from the records; it is the same argument in another format. What is unusual is that he registered it properly, which is the same instinct that produced the label.

The channel

His channel now holds more than three thousand videos, and most of the recent ones are not music. He talks — about violence against women, about young men and delinquency, about gold mining in San Juan, about what he thinks is coming. He books through three phone numbers, one for the United States, one for the Dominican Republic and one for Europe.

That is a different kind of career from the one he started. A Dominican rapper of his generation who is still working is usually still touring on the old records; he is running a label, a school and a daily broadcast, and the music is one of four things he does.