Rauw Alejandro

A knee injury at age twenty ended his football career in Puerto Rico. Raúl Alejandro Ocasio Ruiz had to reinvent himself in a bedroom in Carolina with a borrowed computer and a SoundCloud account. It took him six years to step onto a professional set.

The body, in reality, never stopped calling the shots.

Long before he learned to project his voice into a studio microphone, Rauw Alejandro already understood the kinetics of movement. He grew up copying the steps of Michael Jackson in the living room and absorbed the artistic discipline of a family of musicians. When Spanish-language urban sound still relied on the stillness of street-corner live performance, he decided that every concert and music video should be filmed with the choreographic precision of a classic musical.

In 2020 he released Afrodisíaco, his first studio album, surrounding himself with some of the heaviest names in Puerto Rican music while refining a meticulously calculated visual identity.

Choreography, synthesizers and slow motion

His real commercial breakthrough came in 2021 with the release of Vice Versa. His lead single, Todo de ti, surpassed one billion streams on Spotify, blending '80s funk rhythms with choreography on roller skates filmed in one continuous take.

That broke completely with the visual codes of traditional reggaeton. The video didn't go for the usual club pose; instead it leaned into the lightness of late-twentieth-century pop cinema and the physical elasticity suited to fast-consumption formats.

And the gamble paid off perfectly.

From there, his audiovisual work gained technical complexity. For the album Saturno in 2022, the musician adopted a pure science-fiction aesthetic inspired by early-'90s breakdance and Japanese anime. He created the alter ego El Zorro, under which he co-directed several videos with filmmaker Martin Seipel, personally supervising color correction and rhythmic editing in the edit suite.

Venturing into Fiction and Paying Tribute to Fania

His acting debut came in 2023 during the third season of Sky Rojo, the Spanish production by Vancouver Media for Netflix. He played Diego, a mechanic who shared tense dramatic moments with Lali Espósito inside a classic Cadillac filmed on location in Tenerife.

It wasn't a big role. But a few minutes were enough to show his screen appeal and a confident sense of timing in front of the action camera.

In 2024, he took his cinematic storytelling to a new level with his album Cosa Nuestra. The art direction took us to New York in 1970, paying tribute to the salsa of Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe with diplomatic-stripe suits and chiaroscuro lighting directly inspired by Martin Scorsese.

Para el videoclip de Let the Right One In en 2024 fichó como coprotagonista al actor Adrien Brody, rodando planos dramáticos con óptica de 35 milímetros en un club nocturno reconstruido en estudio.

In 2025 he expanded that concept with Cosa Nuestra: Capítulo 0, closing out a production phase in which he invested more than two million dollars in analog sets so he could do away with green screens entirely.