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Fantastic Negrito

Bay Area-based singer/songwriter Xavier Dphrepaulezz rebooted his career in the 2010s by adopting the name Fantastic Negrito and pioneering a blues, hip-hop, rock, folk, and funk hybrid on his 2016 album The Last Days of Oakland. The record arrived 21 years after X Factor, a record he released on Interscope under the name Xavier in 1995, but The Last Days of Oakland functioned as a de facto debut, showcasing an inventive, passionate musician who pulled together all the different, sometimes contradictory sounds in 21st century America and played with the past as a way to comment upon the present. These skills came into sharp relief on the albums he released in the wake of The Last Days, records grounded in the blues yet incorporating soul, funk, and hip-hop in a vibrant fashion. Please Don't Be Dead and Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?, the albums he respectively released in 2018 and 2020, both won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album, while 2022's White Jesus Black Problems found Fantastic Negrito pushing further into the funky unknown. The son of a Somali-Caribbean immigrant father and a mother from the U.S. South, Dphrepaulezz was born in Massachusetts. He spent his early childhood there, raised in an orthodox Muslim household, then the family moved to Oakland when he was 12 years old. He delved deeply into music, learning several instruments, and started to write songs, developing a funky, soulful hybrid of R&B-rock. A few years passed before he went south to Los Angeles, signing a record contract with Interscope, which issued X Factor in 1995. The album didn't gain much traction and Dphrepaulezz soon found himself embroiled in record label battles, all of which paled when compared to the serious car accident he suffered in 2000. He spent four weeks in a coma, and once he got out of it, he found his hands were damaged considerably. He spent time in intensive rehab, then went back to Oakland in 2008. Dphrepaulezz left music behind for family and home, eventually returning to performing after the birth of his son. Newly inspired, he found himself drawn to the blues. He renamed himself Fantastic Negrito and began working as an indie artist. His first big break arrived in 2015, when "Lost in a Crowd" won a Tiny Desk concert competition on NPR, and then the full-length The Last Days of Oakland, his first as Fantastic Negrito, arrived in the summer of 2016. A major breakthrough for Dphrepaulezz, the album was a critical and commercial success, winning a 2017 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album. His follow-up, Please Don't Be Dead, took home the same Grammy in 2019. Fantastic Negrito delivered the politically charged and musically streamlined Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? in August 2020. Like its predecessor, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? won the Grammy award for Best Contemporary Blues Album. Fantastic Negrito returned in June 2022 with White Jesus Black Problems, a multi-media project inspired by the story of his seventh-generations-removed grandparents. His grandmother was a white Scottish indentured servant, and his grandfather was enslaved. The pair lived together in a common-law marriage that defied the racist laws of colonial Virginia in the 1750s, a saga Fantastic Negrito documents on his 13-song album and its accompanying film. Fantastic Negrito continued to explore his White Jesus Black Problems project with 2023's Grandfather Courage, which featured acoustic-based reworkings of the songs from that album recorded with his touring band.
© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo
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