Songwriter and Musician Fantastic Negrito Turns Trauma Into Art

The story of Fantastic Negrito is one of those stranger-than-fiction tales – born Xavier Dphrepaulezz and raised in a strict Muslim home, he had an aborted career as an R&B star under the name Xavier, a near-fatal car accident, a seven year break from music, and then came roaring back with what he called “Black roots music for Everyone.” As Fantastic Negrito, he won the first NPR Tiny Desk Concert and then three Grammys for his stomping, blues-rockin’ albums. But the story has taken another unexpected twist, and that has led to Fantastic Negrito’s new album, Son Of A Broken Man. 

During the quarantine part of the pandemic, Fantastic Negrito dug into his family’s past on one of the ancestry sites. He’d found that he was the son of a “yarn-spinning” father who claimed roots in East Africa, but whose lineage actually went back several generations to a tobacco plantation in Virginia. Between the large number of siblings and the “punk rock story” of mixed marriage in his family, he uncovered a lot of inconsistencies with the stories of the past, and a whole lot of loving. Fantastic Negrito “hides behind the flashy jacket” and turns his trauma into art, playing some of his blues-stomp-and-roll music for everyone, in-studio. - Caryn Havlik

Set list: 1. Devil In My Pocket 2. Crooked Road 3. I Hope Somebody's Loving You 4. Son of a Broken Man