Fantastic Negrito
He survived robbery at gunpoint, a near-fatal car crash and a stab at pop stardom to become Grammy-winning blues innovator Fantastic Negrito.
He survived gun-robbery, a near-fatal car crash and a stab at pop stardom to become Grammy-winning blues innovator Fantastic Negrito. And he’s never sounded better than on his new album.
Xavier Dphrepaulezz has the calm but confident manner of someone with nothing to prove. An easy, personable 50-year-old, off stage he goes by ‘X’, although you sense he could pull off ‘Fantastic Negrito’ if he wanted. Sitting in a central London hotel today his tall, slim frame is wrapped in a long patterned jacket, his sizeable Afro under a blue hat. The overall look is part elegant dandy, part friendly hippie.
He’s here to promote Please Don’t Be Dead, his second album as Fantastic Negrito. The first, Last Days Of Oakland, won the Grammy last year for
Best Modern Blues Album. His latest is a thrillingly urgent fusion of Delta blues, hip-hop beats, stirring soul and funky chops. If Skip James and Prince made an album today, it might sound like this.
X’s own musical diet spans the likes of Robert Johnson, Black Sabbath, Sly Stone, Chris Cornell (an old friend and supporter), Kendrick Lamar and various new Oakland artists, but initially it was questions from this side of the Atlantic that inspired him.
“People kept asking me the same question when I was over here on tour last year,” he recalls: “‘What’s going on in America?!’ We seemed unstable to them. And it changed my perspective. I thought: ‘What’s the one thing that unites people? The riff! I was watching a fight on the street, and I thought: ‘I betcha these people hate everybody, but I bet they like Johnny B. Goode.”
He says the album’s title was born out of fear for the life of his son (now aged nine), going forward in a turbulent 21st-century USA. Songs such as Letter To Fear tap into the escalation of gun crime; ‘Sunday morning, another mass shooting for your head’ reads one lyric, written after X learned that 26 people had been shot in a church in Texas.
“I think we have a serious gun problem,” he says. “I mean, I’m a gun owner, I’m not anti-gun. But there’s something wrong with the culture, minds, hearts and souls of people. Of course there’s a gun violence problem with police law enforcement against blacks. I think they see us as kind of monsters. There’s so much fear in the US.” He pauses briefly, thinking. “Musically and philosophically, the job of artists right now is to really be on the front line of this thing. I don’t care about being cool or hip, I want to write about things that really matter.”
Dphrepaulezz’s journey began in late-60s Massachusetts, where he was the eighth of 14 children. His father, a Somali-Caribbean immigrant born in 1905 (and 33 years older than his mother), ran a strict orthodox Muslim household where the music played was a mix of African, Indian, jazz and classical. But it was the blues he heard at his elderly relations’ house in rural southern Virginia that had real lasting impact. Not that he realised it at the time.
“My great uncle, he was the guy that sat on the porch, he had one arm and he was a complete drunk, but he was a blues head,” he remembers. “At the time, I thought: ‘I don’t like this, I like hip-hop.’ But he introduced me to this spirit.”
When X was 12, the family moved to Oakland, California. The punk, hip-hop and street life there was a massive culture shock for a boy raised in “very white” New England. It was also completely intoxicating, and he left home as soon as he could.
“I never saw my dad again which is…” he searches for the word, smiling nervously, “interesting. Probably deep inside, that’s traumatic to me. But it was my choice. I respect my Massachusetts upbringing, because it gave me a different perspective. At the time it was a little… bit of hell. But it made me a lot more open.”
“There’s so much fear in the US. The job of artists now is to be on the front line.”
Fantastic Negrito’s blues cure
Set loose in the city, moving between foster homes, reform schools and sleeping in abandoned cars, Dphrepaulezz established himself as a colourful local hustler. Upon discovering Prince, he started sneaking into music rooms at the University of California in Berkeley to teach himself piano.
“I was a complete weirdo to these people,” he says, laughing. “Especially the black community. I’d be walking through the ’hood in these outrageous outfits – I had leopard-skin cowboy boots with orange pants and captains jackets… – but in some of those toughest neighbourhoods, people were like: ‘Man, this guy, I gotta respect him; who the fuck would dress like this?’”
At the height of America’s crack epidemic, however, life was dangerous. Lives were lost, including those of friends and his brother. After an encounter one day when he had a robber’s 9mm gun against his head, he decided he’d had enough. The next day, he hitched to Los Angeles.
Initially he lived in abandoned cars again. But then a demo he’d recorded found its way into the hands of Prince’s manager. In a fairytale-esque twist, X was signed to Interscope Records, taken off the street and given a stipend: “I started giving my mom money every month. I bought her her first new car. And then I just bought equipment. I wanted to play music and get going. I thought:
‘I’m gonna be a fucking star. I’m in my twenties, I want everything.’”
He made an album, 1995’s mixed-bag The X Factor, but ultimately spent several years “toiling in obscurity”, unable to be the pop star that Interscope needed him to be, and still searching for his own sound. Then, in 1999, he was in a car accident which left him in a coma for three weeks.
“I didn’t have insurance, so as soon as I could open my eyes they were like: ‘You need to get the hell out of here,’ he recalls, laughing, and looking at the scar across his right hand, which never regained full function. “But they were kind. Someone helped me get a hospital bed and they put it in the living room in my sister’s house. It took me about a year to recover from that.”
Once on his feet again he threw himself into projects, including illegal after-hours nightclubs and licensing music for films and TV, recorded under different guises.
In 2008 he changed tack again, selling all his music equipment and moving back to Oakland to have children and become an urban farmer (read: grow weed, as well as the more usual vegetation which he still grows today). For five years he didn’t play music. But he did help others, through Blackball Universe, the artistic collective he co-founded with writer/film producer Malcolm Spellman (Empire), a friend from his hustling days. His cohort eventually expected him to make his own material, however, so X turned to the old blues he’d been revisiting in his 40s. Mixed with the eclectic musical insight he’d acquired over the years, he developed his own melodious yet vital brand of black roots music. Twenty-three years after his first break, Fantastic Negrito was born.
“I think I needed to live, I think I needed to fail, I think I needed to bury my brother,” he says. “I think I needed to try and be a star and fall down. I think I needed the accident.”