Rising blues rocker Fantastic Negrito has released a video for Searching For Captain Save A Hoe, taken from his highly-praised recent album How You Lost Your Mind Yet?
The track is a reinvention of Captain Save A Hoe, released by Bay Area rapper E-40 – who appears on the new version – in 1993. The song popularised the phrase "Captain Save a Hoe", which was originally used in Blaxploitation movies to describe men who saw themselves as the financial saviour of underprivileged women.
“Working with E-40 is like working with a God of Hip Hop,” says Fantastic Negrito. “I am such a fan of his work. He is, and has always been so original. Light years ahead of what everyone was doing. I think people are just catching up with the genius of E-40.
“You have to be familiar with E-40’s work to understand the title Searching For Captain Save A Hoe. For those who are not, I was reversing the role in the original Captain Save A Hoe – Captain Save a Hoe was reformed and became a saviour of men, and in the new song I am searching for him.
"I wrote the song from the perspective that I am the ‘hoe.’ Me and my fellow man. Because culturally we refer to women as ‘hoes’ when in fact we are the biggest hoes in the world."
Fantastic Negrito is interviewed in the issue 279 of Classic Rock, where he discusses subjects ranging from race to fashion, the NFL, gardening and the blues.
“People ask me: ‘Do you consider yourself a bluesman?" he says. "You don’t even have a twelve-bar blues song!’ Oh, I absolutely do. I feel like bluesmen were the first punk rockers. I mean, just being black and picking up a guitar in 1920, that was punk rock as hell! They were punk rockers! Nobody’s more punk rock than Robert Johnson. Listen to his lyrics! Nobody! I mean, these dudes were just such maverick rebels.
"I still listen to that music and get tears and chills. And when I hear Skip James, y’know what I hear? Protest songs! Man, they’re letting you know what’s going on. My mother’s people are all deep southern rural people from Virginia. I remember asking my grandmother about the blues, and she said: ‘Honey, white people thought we were sad. We weren’t sad!’ Blues is medicine. It was medicine for the spirit."
Classic Rock 279 is on sale now.
