Whitest Taino Alive are a Dominican hip hop trio from Santo Domingo, made up of Jorge Read, Anthony Guerrero and César Pineda, who record as Cohoba “DaBeat Ortiz”, Haru “Jon Blon Jovi” and “Dominicanye West”. They are also called Los Taínos.

The name

It is a joke folded twice. The Whitest Boy Alive were a Norwegian indie band; the Taínos were the Arawak people who were living on the island when Europeans arrived. Putting the two together names a very specific kind of Dominican — one raised on foreign indie records who is nonetheless from here, and who knows exactly how absurd that combination sounds.

The individual billings work the same way. Dominicanye West and Jon Blon Jovi are the same joke made three times, and the joke is about what a Dominican is allowed to sound like.

¿Dónde Jugarán Los Cueros?

Their debut album came out on Stereoptico, a Dominican independent label, and its title bends Maná’s ¿Dónde Jugarán los Niños? into a Dominican street word. Chillín en Jaragua is the track most people found first.

It arrived when Dominican urban music meant dembow and almost nothing else. What they were making was slower, stranger and closer to alternative rap, and the foreign press noticed before the local industry did — VICE in 2015, the Miami New Times the following year.

In late 2015 they put out a set of remixes of the album built around producers who had barely been heard, which is a specific choice about what an established name is for.

Since

Mi Musa followed in 2017 and Manda Nudes after it, and they recorded with La Ñapa, the trio from Santiago — a Santiago and Santo Domingo record, which the Dominican rap scene does less often than one might expect.

The Dominican press has described them as a group that personifies a modern Dominican identity, which is the polite way of saying they refused to choose between the island and everything else they had listened to.