GRAMMY-WINNING FANTASTIC NEGRITO TEAMS WITH TAJ MAHAL FOR SHOW
Musician’s genre is hard to pin down; just how he likes it
Winning a Grammy is exciting. Having three consecutive albums win Grammy Awards is stunning. Xavier Dphrepaulezz, aka Fantastic Negrito, has won Best Contemporary Blues Album in 2017, 2019 and 2021, or once for each album he’s released since gaining attention after winning the 2015 NPR Tiny Desk Contest. He’s appreciative of the accolades, but Dphrepaulezz is driven by something deeper than critical or commercial success.
“I feel gratitude, but it’s something I don’t really think about. An album takes a lot of people to create and I’m really glad for my team,” Dphrepaulezz said. “But in the period of now, with this pandemic and half a million lost lives, I’m just feeling extremely fortunate and feel a gratitude just to be here.
“I want to contribute, rather than sell records and make money, I can feel my blood, my life pulsating through my body when I do,” he continued. “I use the word ‘contribute’ all the time; it gives life purpose. A lot of the greatest entertainers die alone somewhere. I became a musician to contribute, not to drive 100,000 ears to Spotify.”
Dphrepaulezz contributes in two meaningful ways. The first is creative. Through his work as Fantastic Negrito, Dphrepaulezz looks to present specific narrative themes from album to album in the hopes of engaging and challenging listeners.
“Last Days of Oakland” took listeners through the changes he was seeing in his Oakland hometown. He describes “Please Don’t Be Dead” as “more combative,” a reflection of the post-2016 election turmoil and a call to “get up and fight this machine.” Last year’s “Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?” addressed mental health and the role social media plays in worsening people’s psyches.
He’s currently at work on his next LP, which Dphrepaulezz has conceptualized
as both a glimpse into the Black experience in America and a journey through his own familial ancestry.
“I never write a 12-bar blues on purpose. I think musically and how to tell a particular story,” he explained. “When I work on a record, it’s a lonely, lonely process. The first step is to stop posturing and find the deepest emotion of what you feel.
“The next record, I really dug into my background and ancestry and things I never learned before, like ‘Oh (bleep) I’m
Scottish! What the (expletive)?,’” Dphrepaulezz added. “I’m the descendant of slaves, of people who owned slaves. In finding what’s in this (bleeping) name,
I’m telling the story of America, the story of myself, finding out what it means to be a Black man in this country.”
While his next album takes shape, Dphrepaulezz is making another contribution, this one to his community and fellow artists. He recently launched Storefront Records in his West Oakland neighborhood to provide an imprint and physical location for like-minded artists to collaborate, record and get their music heard.
Dphrepaulezz has had an atypical career trajectory. In the 1990s he was signed to Interscope Records, but was dumped by the label in 1999 after a cataclysmic car accident left him in a coma for weeks and severely limited his ability to play guitar. It wasn’t until the 2010s, after years of busking and building wordof-mouth buzz that he was able to forge a new career.
These experiences shaped how he works within the music industry and how he sees the treatment of artists. Storefront Records is an important step in changing the power dynamics between artists and the industry, and Dphrepaulezz
is eager to get it running and operational.
“I was always going to struggle; I’m not rap or pop. So why don’t I just put out my own records the way I want to do it,” he noted. “I spent six, seven years on the streets with my guitar, me against the world. People put me here, not corporations.
“I want a record label run by creative people, artists,” Dphrepaulezz enthused. “I’m inspired by people and I want to inspire people. I’m an underdog and this is going to be our label, an underdog label.”
Between an album and a new label, Dphrepaulezz has a lot going on. But this week he’s taking the time out to have a little fun. On March 27, he’s joining the legendary bluesman Taj Mahal for a livestream concert. Sharing a band, it’ll be the first time the two have ever played together. Locally, The Egg is promoting this event and tickets can be purchased at its website.
Mahal and Dphrepeaulezz are good friends. While their music, which can loosely be defined as the blues, isn’t all that similar, the two share a similar aesthetic and desire to use the form as a form of personal and cultural expression. Both men have stripped the blues of the big guitar solos and bombast brought into it by ‘60s and ‘70s rock and in their own ways have brought it back to its cultural and historical essence.
“I have so much in common with Taj Mahal,” he said. “Not so much the music, but the approach. It’s Black roots, American roots, soul, funk, punk, foot stomps and claps, it’s telling a story and a tradition of people capable of surviving everything.
“We weren’t sad, we were surviving through storytelling,” Dphrepaulezz continued. “We’re here, we have stories to tell, they’re important. That’s as American as you can get.”