walking upstream…
El Alfa
sourcesRed Bull Music Academy Daily — Dembow · Berklee Now — Dembow Explained (places El Alfa's "PLEBADA" in the Shabba Ranks/Dem Bow riddim lineage) · Billboard — How Dembow Evolved into the Hottest Thing in Latin Urban Music (genre origin, El Alfa quote on early censorship) · Billboard — From El Alfa to Tokischa, Dembow Is Finally Having Its Moment (genre origin, El Alfa on collaboration culture) · HipLatina — From Reggaeton to Dominican Dembow (Shabba Ranks/Nando Boom lineage, El Alfa's role founding the sub-genre) · Rolling Stone — Dembow Patriarch El Alfa Is Wiser and Stronger Than Ever (bio, career start, birth name)
In March 2022, El Alfa told Billboard what dembow sounded like from outside the industry a decade earlier: "When I'd go to the television and radio stations, they'd say, 'No, we can't play that.' But you step in the streets, and all you could hear was dembow." Born Enmanuel Herrera Batista, he cut his first record at fifteen or sixteen, when, he later said, "there wasn't a future" in the genre and his own family didn't understand what he was doing. Fourteen years on, he sold out Madison Square Garden. Billed as "El Jefe," he built that turnaround on relentless, over-135-BPM riddims and chant-along hooks — "Suave," "Coronao Now," "4K," "La Mamá de la Mamá" — turning a once-banned street sound into a Cardi B and Bad Bunny collaborator's genre. He didn't invent dembow's beat. He made the world dance to it.
the sound in question
2020
4KEl Alfa
walk the tributaries ↓
Shabba Ranks1990s · Dancehall / Reggae
Every history of Dominican dembow starts with a name. Billboard's account of the genre traces it straight to "Jamaican dancehall artist Shabba Ranks' anti-imperialist (and unfortunately, anti-gay) anthem 'Dem Bow,'" the 1990 single the entire style inherited its title from. Ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall's research, cited by Berklee College of Music, goes further, filing El Alfa's own 2023 single "PLEBADA" — a collaboration with Mexican corridos star Peso Pluma — under "Regional Examples of Dembow," in the same rhythmic lineage as Shabba's record. El Alfa didn't choose that inheritance; he was born into a genre that already carried another man's name.
listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — Dembow Took Over the Dominican Republic (Shabba Ranks/Nando Boom riddim lineage) ↗
1990
Dem BowShabba Ranks
2023
PLEBADAEl Alfa
listen forPlay Shabba's "Dem Bow" first: a steady four-to-the-floor kick under a snare that lands hard on the off-beat, looped without variation across the whole record. Then cue "PLEBADA" — the same skeleton, chopped, doubled, and driven past 130 beats per minute, El Alfa's rapid-fire chant riding the identical clipped snare pattern producers built for Shabba in 1990. Peso Pluma's corrido guitar sits on top, but underneath it's still the same boom-ch-boom-chick that gave the genre its name.
Nando Boom1990s · Reggae en español / Dancehall / Reggaeton
The beat under El Alfa's biggest crossover hit isn't, technically, Shabba Ranks' own master. Ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall traced it one step further back: engineer Dennis "The Menace" Thompson built a new instrumental for Panamanian singer Nando Boom's 1990 Spanish-language version of "Dem Bow," titled "Ellos Benia," and as Marshall writes, any track later labeled "Dem Bow" on Latin club compilations "is nearly always based on the drums Dennis the Menace laid down for Nando Boom at HC&F" — not Shabba's original recording. That Long Island session, not the Jamaican one, is the direct technical ancestor of the loop Dominican producers still ride.
listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — Dembow Took Over the Dominican Republic (Shabba Ranks/Nando Boom riddim lineage) ↗
1990
Ellos BeniaNando Boom
2021
La Mamá de la MamáEl Alfa
listen forListen to "Ellos Benia" for the loop itself: a steady kick, a snare cutting hard on the backbeat, and light digital timbale flourishes Thompson layered on for extra flavor. That two-bar cell, not Shabba's original track, is the skeleton under "La Mamá de la Mamá," just hardened, sped past dancehall tempo, and buried beneath El Alfa's chanted hook. The kick-snare pattern survived three decades and a name change to land, barely altered, under a 2021 single that peaked at No. 9 on Billboard's Hot Latin Songs chart.