Looking Inward: Fantastic Negrito’s Constant Inspiration

Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, known as Fantastic Negrito, has a personal story so fascinating that it serves as a well of inspiration. He doesn’t have to use fiction to find a story, but only needs to turn to himself.

“I happen to be very interesting. When you’ve got an interesting story, tell it,” he says bluntly. Fantastic Negrito will perform in Houston at The Heights Theater on Friday, August 30 with Houston blues man The Mighty Orq opening the show.

Fantastic Negrito is coming to Texas fresh off a recent tour with Primus and excited to be in front of audiences again encouraging everyone to come out saying about his shows, “It’s like church without the religion.”

There is a kind of magic to Fantastic Negrito’s openness that not only draws people in but also encourages others to look for the story within themselves and their environment.

His latest project, which has taken on three different incarnations at this point, began with his 2022 album White Jesus Black Problems, released on his own Storefront Records. The album, and accompanying film tells the true story of his seventh generation grandparents’ incredible love story.

The sound of White Jesus Black Problems takes from the very beginning of blues blending early African beats with more modern, distorted sounds creating a blues like no other while maintaining the raw energy of the genre.

The album went on to allow Fantastic Negrito to win his third Grammy award for Best Contemporary Blues Album and he went even further recording the songs from the album in stripped down, acoustic versions on Grandfather Courage.

His white Scottish grandmother, an indentured servant, was able to somehow sustain her common law marriage with her husband, Grandfather courage, despite him being an enslaved African American.

“When I discovered that story in my family archives and this forbidden union that they had in the 1700s on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, I felt compelled and inspired to tell their story through music, film and then the acoustic version because I just felt inspired.”

The strong story and subject matter not only speaks to the bravery and strength of love, but also the complicated history of this country and all of the nuances between race, history and equality.

“The main thing the message I got from my seventh generation grandparents is stop complaining because you’re not going through shit compared to what we went through and we should all be grateful for everything. People have had far greater obstacles and these obstacles must become our fuel these, obstacles must become our inspiration.”

“People have had far greater obstacles and these obstacles must become our fuel these, obstacles must become our inspiration.”

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These are words he clearly lives by as the many obstacles in his colorful life constantly serve to inspire not only his music, but his audience. Born the eighth of fifteen kids to his strict Somali Muslim father in Massachusetts, a young Dphrepaulezz took to street life when the family relocated to Oakland where he still resides.

Selling dope and running amuck, he became aware of Prince and the concept of being a self taught musician, an idea that led him to begin sneaking into music classes at Berkeley pretending to be enrolled there so he could learn a thing or two.

“I had a conversation with Quincy Jones and he told me the same thing,” he explains. “He broke into this place messing around and he saw this piano and I thought, man I can relate to that. Music saves us.”

His first album The X Factor was put out on a major label, Interscope Records, under the name Xavier. After a serious car crash which left him in a three week coma and released from his contract with the label, Dphrepaulezz stepped away from music.

In 2014 he returned, reborn as Fantastic Negrito. “When I came up with Fantastic Negrito I wasn’t talking about myself, I was really talking about the legacy of where I came from and people that contributed so much to this world musically. People that came off the slave ships and that legacy of music, rock, folk, soul, jazz, rhythm and blues, hip hop that’s what’s fantastic. I wasn’t talking about myself.”