Fulanito

With nearly 2 million albums sold worldwide, performances at the world's top Latin music festivals, and a recent Grammy nomination, Fulanito is one of the most popular and innovative acts ever born of the fertile uptown New York Latin hip-hop scene.

The brainchild of the group's founder, lead writer Winston Arsenio Rosa, Fulanito is the first group known to combine perico ripiao - traditional accordion-based merengue sounds from the hills of the Dominican Republic - with modern hip-hop and rap.
While industry leaders initially questioned the commercial potential of such an unusual mix of sounds, Fulanito proved them wrong, becoming a party favorite in the U.S., the top-selling act in Colombia, and one of the most recognizable and adored Latin acts from Chile to Switzerland to Japan.

With their 1997 debut album, El Hombre Mas Famoso de la Tierra (The Most Famous Man in the Land,) Fulanito fast gained international fame with the hit singles Guallando (Grinding) and Novela (The Soap Opera) The album sold 500,000 copies, shocking even Winston, who says he expected it to sell no more than 10,000, and hoped it would simply help us get gigs.

Guallando, featured 71-year-old accordionist Arsenio de la Rosa's lightening chops, and was a surprise hit, co-opted for jingles spun endlessly in nightclubs across the hemisphere. According to Miami-based music writer Karl Ross Guallando marked the first time U.S.-born Dominican performers began to mine their musical roots for inspiration. The addictive, resulting sound appeals as readily to rap fans and world music aficionados - and to many in between. Boston Globe music writer Elijah Wald called Fulanito's sound fresh and hip, completely different from the mechanical beat of most house fusions. The word Fulanito; means, roughly “Little John Doe” in Spanish slang. The roots of the word lie in West Africa, where Spaniards kidnapped men and women to be brought to Spanish colonies in the New World. Among the people brought to the Spanish Caribbean were those of the Fulani nation, known in Africa as great merchants. They brought their skills of commerce with them, and eventually it was known in the Caribbean that if you wanted something done, you went to the Fulani, or business guy.

The group's third album, The Remixes, was released in March of 2001, and contains three new songs. Their fourth album is expected in the fall of 2001. With a solid tour schedule that takes the group from North Carolina to Japan in the span of a month, Fulanito shows no signs of slowing down. In the coming months.

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