Fantastic Negrito won’t be distracted
You’d think that any artist who wins a Grammy award — as Fantastic Negrito did for best contemporary blues album for his 2016 release, “The Last Days of Oakland” — would be thrilled. But Negrito, born Xavier Dphrepaulezz in 1968, saw it as a distraction.
“What did winning a Grammy do for me?” says the singer. “It made me want to get rid of my Grammy, pack it away and never see it again. It made me not want to speak to anyone who wanted to speak about my Grammy.”
But rather than cut our interview short, the garrulous Dphrepaulezz is happy to elaborate. “Dwelling on awards like that is such a dangerous road,” he says. “I want to be an artist, not be in the business of making hit records. Once I figured that out, everything became clear.”
He had crashed on that road before. As a kid, Dphrepaulezz grew up amid hustlers, pimps and drug dealers in Oakland but pulled himself out by teaching himself how to play multiple instruments. He was signed to a record deal by Jimmy Iovine of Interscope and put out his debut album, a pop-leaning affair called “The X Factor,” in 1996, under the name Xavier. The record tanked, and Dphrepaulezz took it hard.
“I was in my 20s, and I was a genius, I knew everything,” he says with a laugh. “I realize now that was supposed to happen. It taught me that I don’t want to measure success by that because it can be an end of freedom and expression.”
But before that revelation, there was more hardship. A near-fatal car crash left him in a coma and damaged his hand so badly he feared he would never play guitar again. When he recovered, he played in a variety of bands, licensed some of his music, and then dropped out altogether in 2007.
“Mainly I wanted to be a farmer and grow some weed and vegetables — and live,” he says.
He kept one beat-up guitar, and he finally pulled it out one day when his young son began crying.
“I played something off the top of my head ... and my son’s reaction ... changed the course of my life,” he says.
Dphrepaulezz found himself drifting back to the black roots music he had first heard as a child at home but had initially dismissed as foreign, unconnected to his life.
He dubbed himself “Fantastic Negrito” as a way of appropriating a word he heard a lot while living in close proximity to MexicanAmerican families in his childhood neighborhood.
“I have (three) little children, and I want to make music in which they can find some truth and wisdom when I’m gone,” he says.