Three-time Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter Fantastic Negrito is rarely hesitant to travel. Since winning the first-ever NPR Tiny Desk Contest from among 7,000 entrants with a one-take video in 2015, the musician—born Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz—has taken his masterful guitar playing and raw-to-silky voice to more than 43 countries.
Nor is Dphrepaulezz fearful about taking on fresh challenges. Headlining major shows and festivals worldwide and in the Bay Area, the self-taught Oakland-based artist has collaborated or appeared with big-name peers such as Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Sting, Tank, Sam Smith and more.
Dphrepaulezz (pronounced dee-FREP-ah-lez), born in Western Massachusetts and the eighth of 15 children in an Orthodox Muslim family, famously survived a near-fatal car crash that destroyed his playing hand. Overcoming that physical and mental trauma and pumping energy into creativity, he has issued seven albums; become a father; founded Revolution Plantation, an urban farm aimed at youth education and empowerment; and established his own label, Storefront Records, which signed its first artist other than Dphrepaulezz in March of this year.
About to embark on a four-month tour with his latest album, Son of a Broken Man, Dphrepaulezz has an itinerary that features him bouncing between gigs worldwide.
Even so, the journey he took in 2023 into the history of his fraught father-son relationship with his dad, a Somalian man born in 1905 who died in 1992, filled him with trepidation and proved arduous. Said Dphrepaulezz in an interview in April, “The album is the oldest story in the world: the struggle between a father and son, and the complexity in that relationship. That was extremely difficult to confront, but once it caught fire, it was better.”
He recalled that truth and discoveries made about himself and his father unfolded in astonishing sequences and forms. “One of the strangest things is my dad just invented our last name. Most people aren’t aware of that because I haven’t spoken about it at length. I discovered it while diving deep into trying to have a relationship to him long after he had died,” he noted. “I asked myself why someone would make up a name that had almost every letter in the alphabet, mostly consonants, and a name people couldn’t pronounce? It was earth-shattering to me.”
With time spent in contemplation, he realized this man born in the early 20th century and age 63 when Dphrepaulezz was born—his mother was 30—was “a Black man who happened to be brilliant, creative, radical—and also abusive, horrible and negligent.”
Dphrepaulezz remembered being accused of emphasizing his father’s best qualities and mischaracterizing him as a hero. “Let’s state for the record he was horrible. But it’s not true that people are one thing. We are many things. It’s dismissive to say someone is only horrible or abusive. I like the question, ‘Why?’ Why are horrible people the way they are? And for him to be exceptionally intelligent? For a Black man in 1905, that could be a death sentence,” he pointed out.
Learning his father’s history has led to forgiveness and some answers to the haunting “whys.” The made-up name was a form of passive resistance, a difficult-to-pronounce cluster of syllables that baffled the world and especially white people in power.
“Who is this Dphrepaulezz? Is he someone special, and I should treat him differently? The deception was a tool to navigate difficult, racist terrain,” he said. “We use words now, like racism, but I don’t think any of us can imagine what it was like at that time. He invented the kind of grand, quintessential American story made up by immigrants like him that came to this country. Stories for deception, for survival. Even now, we’re swimming in a modernity where deception is prevalent.”
There is no sway given to deception in telling his life story in conversation and in his portfolio of albums. Son of a Broken Man, released in October 2024, follows 2022’s acoustic re-recording of “White Jesus Black Problems,” which delved into racism and told the story of his grandparents, an interracial couple who lived in Virginia in the 1950s.
The new album’s 11-track song cycle veers from intensely personal songs that pierce the heart with vulnerability and longing. Lyrics sometimes pour forth like tears wrung from a wet towel. Referring to times when he “felt sick, had a broken heart/Wandered in the dark,” and worse, the layers of trauma and yearning on other tracks grind against each other, sparking flamelike words that seem to simultaneously burn and purify his psyche.
The album is flooded with gritty funk, but also gorgeous ballads, as well as hints of Latin percussion, East Indian tuning, blues grooves and music that can only have risen from his ancestral roots in the Deep South. Dphrepaulezz’s surprising and high-spirited take on a gospel standard, “This Little Light of Mine,” adds a bit of church and is nothing short of brilliant.
“Let’s look at the word truth,” he said, about the album’s content. “Boy, isn’t that in jeopardy and quickly fading in our modern era? I think it’s a lifetime journey, to find true self. I make music that’s a coping mechanism based on trying to recover. My situation: rejected at age 12 by my parents, living on the streets until I was taken into foster care. Love was something that escaped me most of my life.
“I grew up with a great sense of loss and abandonment,” he added. “At age four, my parents told me we couldn’t talk to my first brother anymore. He disappeared, and I never saw him again. To this day, I still don’t know where he is, and I’m 57 now.”
Dphrepaulezz admitted writing lyrics is his greatest challenge as a musician, doubly so for the new album. “I’d love to make an album where I just freestyle everything. This story, it’s complicated. I love my father, and I despise him. Now that I’m a father, I think what a horrible job he did. There was 90% that was horrible, and 10% of him that was brilliant and gave me my foundation as a man navigating this world,” he revealed.
Rarely impressed by his own lyrics, he worked hard to craft a story in ways “where there’s resolve and a solution,” he said. “With ‘I Hope Somebody’s Loving You,’ I struggled with that song for years. ‘Devil in My Pocket,’ I thought, what is that really about? Maybe fatalism? Maybe there’s not much new, and we’re a little too impressed with ourselves?
“People connect with it when they hear it live, big time. Because it’s accusatory maybe? I may not know for 20 years what it is. That’s a heavy song. Maybe it’s just the fu**ing challenge of being a human being. We’re brilliant and we’re disgusting. We cured polio, and then we committed the Holocaust, the Atlantic slave trade. We created modern medicine and food, but some of it can give you cancer. I don’t know anything … but I’m curious,” he continued.
Curiosity and a desire to produce music independently led to Storefront Records and Everything Velvet, the label’s first signed artist other than Dphrepaulezz. During a recording session, a sound engineer, in response to his request to hear a female singer take his place, dubbed in a then-unknown-to-him voice. “It had texture, character, feeling, honesty, cadence, delivery,” he recalled. “I was completely blown away.”
Dephrepaulezz said it “took years to cultivate the tools” to run a label and prepare to produce the work of other artists. Pursuing an organic process and applying an anticipatory “wait and see what happens” mindset, his goal is to avoid “formulaic, cookie-cutter music, not punk-ish, formless music.”
In the studio and (literally) outside its four walls, two most beloved projects include Revolution Plantation, aimed mostly at youths, and events he calls “mixers,” during which invited groups of no more than 30 adults gather for conversation.
The urban farming Revolution Plantation program immerses young people in hands-on agriculture and taps his Southern roots with lessons in wisdom learned from his grandmother.
“She was the only person I felt truly loved by, aside from my partner and children now,” said Dephrepaulezz. “She wasn’t well-read, but she had a rich life philosophy. When I was filming her one time, I asked her to talk to me about segregation. She said she didn’t have many problems with white folks. That made me sit up.
“She said, ‘We had our own farm. The neighbors had goats and cows, and others had chickens.’ She was talking about a collective. I thought, wow, this is the most revolutionary sh**. Here, in southern rural Virginia and a town of only 600, my grandmother, this frail woman, was telling me about empowerment and self-determination,” he added.
People, he believes, are exactly like plants. “If you give them light, love, space, good food, good water, plants will provide you with power over your food source. If you don’t give all of those things, with people, they’ll break into your car, rob you at grocery stores. I love that correlation,” he said. “There are so many lessons and unbelievable skills one can attain on a family farm. It’s a place to congregate and eat. It’s simple, but revolutionary.”
Arguably more complex but equally radical and all about community gathering, are the invitation-only mixers. People share powerful personal testimonies and hold conversations he says are vital, but infrequent.
“People are talking at each other, not to each other, especially people who disagree,” said Dephrepaulezz. “I thought, Why is this happening? The ‘why’ is more important than how terrible something is. ‘Why’ will help us. Saying (expletive) to this and throwing up your hands, that’s not gonna help us. The answers to ‘why’ will. I feel like, in my music and these activities, I was put on Earth for this purpose. This is exactly where I’m meant to be.”
