On Xavier Dphrepaulezz’s website is a photo of a smashed-up yellow car. The wreck is a result of a 1999 crash, and it forever changed the man who now performs as Fantastic Negrito.
Dphrepaulezz spent three weeks in a coma and was in recovery for months afterwards. “I was driving along and the next thing I know, I woke up and I had a nice beard,” he says of the accident.
Seventeen years later, the crash is still with him. He lifts his right arm and shows his curled, clawed hand: “This arm still doesn’t move all the way. I’ve got titanium rods and pins in both hands and arms.”
At the time of the crash, Dphrepaulezz was signed to Interscope Records. Three years previously, he had released his debut album, The X Factor, under the name Xavier. It flopped.
“It was no one’s fault,” he shrugs. “You had a young artist, you had a record label with a lot of money, but there was no understanding or meeting of the minds. I didn’t know the business. I thought you just make music and the rest took care of itself. I’m not a big fan of blaming others, though. Things happen, and you have to deal with it.”
For Dphrepaulezz, music was an escape from his life in Oakland, California. Interscope’s big cheese, Jimmy Iovine, had signed him when he was playing in an LA band called Dead from Sex, and Dphrepaulezz thought he had hit the big time.
“Like any other twentysomething, I didn’t know myself. I didn’t listen to anyone’s advice. I was trying to get away from my life at the time in Oakland, and I didn’t know what else I would do. I was doing some hustling as a drug dealer and there was a lot of trouble as a result of that lifestyle. I wanted to get out of there and I didn’t have any other talent, so I started pursuing music.”
Dropped in the hospital
While he was recovering from the car accident, Interscope got in touch with some news. “I found out in the hospital that I was dropped,” he says with a smile. “Look, I’m not saying it was by design, but that’s how it happened.”
After getting out of hospital, he decided he had had enough of music. “I quit music for five years. I sold all my gear, my keyboards, my guitars. I was finished. I didn’t want to play any more. I didn’t think I’d anything to say. I was making children, not making music.”
Aside from becoming a dad, Dphrepaulezz’s post-Interscope life took some interesting twists and turns, including running an illegal after-hours nightclub, a studio and a gallery. He also got involved in agriculture.
“I became a marijuana farmer,” he says. “I got to grow other organic crops too, and be involved in other interesting activities, which were fun and legal. It was a good business and I used to sell to the dispensaries, but it’s saturated now.”
Hooked on the blues
The blues brought Dphrepaulezz back to music.
“I went back and listened to the music of my grandparents, the likes of Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson. It was finally interesting to me. Before, I respected it but I didn’t get it and I wasn’t ready for it. When I got back into music, I really wanted it to be genuine. I wanted to say things that people don’t really say, and I thought that was the influence which was going to guide me.”
Dphrepaulezz believes you need to have the life experience before you truly understand the blues. “I think I was ready for the blues because I had lived. I was in my 40s. I’d fallen on my ass a bunch of times. I’d been depressed. I’d got through a serious accident and lost my hand.
“My brother was killed, my cousin was killed, people were killed around me. I’d grieved over death and enjoyed the birth of children, and I was ready because the blues finally resonated with me. It was the eeriness of it which made me go, ‘Holy shit, I’m ready’.”
Fantastic Negrito is Dphrepaulezz the showman, a colourful character whose music draws on blues, funk, soul and rock’n’roll. He shaped and honed his chops as a solo performer by playing on the mean streets of Oakland and San Francisco. “I would pick the busiest spot where no one wanted to hear me, and you knew then that the reaction you got was honest. I was playing songs and seeing the reaction and practising. I really started Fantastic Negrito to get out of the house and play my guitar.”
Fear and hope
His new album, The Last Days of Oakland, sees Dphrepaulezz realising that the world he once knew so well is changing.
“The way things were is just over,” he says. “The Oakland I came up with, the city with that edgy vibe, is gone. I don’t think it’s bad and I don’t think change is bad either, and when something ends, it’s the opportunity for something to begin.
“In cities like Oakland, black folks are moving out of the centres, into the suburbs. I think people work harder than they’ve ever done, but are bringing home less money. I think that it’s probably unprecedented in the history economically of the United States that such a small amount of people control all the wealth.
“There’s an atmosphere of fear, which I attribute a lot to Donald Trump, whose campaign and tactics are all about fear. Fear is powerful, and you see it being deployed again and again throughout history. And it’s shocking that people still go for it. I think we’re better than that.
"I love the country I'm from. It's so innovative and has a rich culture, especially with music. But at the same time, there is a very mean side to it. The minute you fall off the ladder, you're cut off. There's a very predatory, capitalist mindset in play, and I think we're out of gas with it. I feel that's what The Last Days of Oakland is also about.
“I think and hope that era may be coming to an end, and it’s up to us to decide what happens now.”
- The Last Days of Oakland is out now
