The Boundless Optimism and Timeless Wisdom of Fantastic Negrito
Xavier Dphrepaulezz’s triumph is the feel-good story we need to hear
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
Before Xavier Dphrepaulezz became Fantastic Negrito, the Oakland musician who won two Grammys for Best Contemporary Blues Album in the past three years, he was, for a brief period in 2012, my weed dealer.
Every week or so, he’d stop by my Berkeley apartment in an old car with a car seat in the back to deliver eighths that made my shifts as a barista more bearable. I’d always hated the awkward small talk that accompanied these sorts of encounters, the feigned attempts that the exchange was anything but transactional. But it was different with Dphrepaulezz. He had an infectious positivity to him, one that seemed unbefitting of his circumstances and the challenges life had thrown his way.
As Dphrepaulezz busted out small bags of OG Kush, he told me of his past lives: a youth spent on the streets of Oakland, where he says he robbed homes and sold crack; a momentary brush with fame in the 1990s as a crooning R&B singer and self-taught multi-instrumentalist with a million-dollar record deal whose career and creativity foundered under the…
