Fantastic Negrito spoke with Wikimetal about his career and society
Fantastic Negrito is a man of three lives. Each phase of his 51 years has a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. The third phase, the current one, has yielded an international career and two Grammys . A sound laden with influences from black music and lyrics concerned with social issues.
Xavier Dphrepaulezz was born in Massachusetts in the late 1960s, the eighth of 15 children. At 12, he moved to Oakland, California. The city was exploding with culture. Opposites coexisted, hip hop and punk were on the rise. Xavier, who wasn't yet Fantastic Negrito, spent his days on the streets pulling off petty scams and selling drugs.
“Oakland is a city of scams. Not in a bad way, but in the sense of trying to get by,” Dphrepaulezz explained in an interview with Wikimetal. “I carried bags for people at the market to get some coins.” But the city was also experiencing a boom in drug use, and he, a young black man from a working-class background, got involved in trafficking in search of money.
The Californian underground, which blended the experience of a class society with culture, ignited the musical spark in Xavier. "I grew up among hippies," he joked. "From the cradle of freedom of speech. I listened to Metallica, Green Day, Creedence Clearwater Revival . The counterculture influenced me from the beginning."
With the start of phase two, Xavier taught himself to play music at age 17. “I saw music as an opportunity to escape the violence of the streets.” In 1993, after much struggle, he secured a deal with a former manager of Prince and released his first album, *The X Factor* . “I stayed with the record label for five years, toured with De La Soul . But it was a failure. Nobody listened.”
It was then that Xavier was in a car accident and lost the use of his hand, which prevented him from playing. “At that moment, I felt like I had nothing to say. I am an artist, more than a musician. I want to build feelings. I stop again if I feel like I have nothing to say to the world.”
Xavier gave up playing. He returned to the Los Angeles underground, where he met rock en español bands and the Afro movement. He cultivated a marijuana farm, which lasted 7 years. During that time, he had a revelation. “I stopped asking what music could give me. Can it give me shoes? Can it give me women? Can it give me drugs? A car, a house? I started asking myself what I could give to music.”
And then Fantastic Negrito appears, Xavier's third life. “I invented that name because someone told me white people wouldn't like saying 'Negrito.' 'Oh, really? Interesting,'” Negrito laughs as he explains. He would go out into the streets, listening to conversations, recording sounds, asking people to say whatever came to mind. “The kind of music I want to make now is the kind you could sing on the porch with your grandma. Just clapping, or humming something.”
The Last Days of Oakland and Please Don't Be Dead are the works resulting from his politically engaged phase. The latter is a plea to the US and the world: “Please don't be dead. Remember when there was no racism, when there was no sexism or homophobia? Please, let that time not be dead.”
Negrito's emergence coincided with the rise of a conservative wave sweeping the world. Trump, and his prejudice against Black and Latino people, are part of Negrito's agenda. "I think everyone's rights are in danger. When you start turning against one group, guess what, you could be next. Sometimes, Black and Latino people are in the lower classes, so they are the first targets."
He rejects the title of activist, but believes that artists have a social responsibility. “It’s simple, it doesn’t matter your ideology, your political party. What matters is how you treat people. A revolution can happen every day, it depends on you being kind to everyone.”.
With his two new albums, Fantastic Negrito's music has gained more and more influences from Black music. Both, in fact, earned him the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album. "Music is a contribution to the world, it sends a message of love and unity.".
“Take That Bullshit, Turn It Into Good Shit,” a song from Please Don't Be Dead , is the motto of Xavier's final phase. “Take racism, homophobia, sexism, all that shit and turn it into good things. It's quite simple, really. Music is the purest form of communication. It's inspiring.”
