FANTASTIC NEGRITO

An inventive modern-day blues musician who plays with tradition and culture. 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. This album arrived 11 years after X Factor, an album 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. 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 read more...