seventh-generationFantastic Negrito – real name Xavier Dphrepaulezz – hasn’t so much had a career as a journey that’s seen his sphere of reference move ever closer to his core. So while his 2016 album, The Last Days Of Oakland, cast a sharp eye over his adopted hometown’s gentrification, its follow-ups – the righteous howl of anger that is Please Don’t Be Dead (2018) and the politically charged Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?, which coincided with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement two years later – were no less incisive in their condemnations of the social injustice and racism that continues to blight American society.
Little wonder all three were bestowed the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album. More recently, 2022’s multi-media project White Jesus Black Problems and its acoustic sibling Grandfather Courage told the 270-year-old love story of his seventh generation Scottish grandmother and enslaved African grandfather in 1750s Virginia.
Son Of A Broken Man brings Fantastic Negrito’s story up to date but the pain at its heart stabs harder than anything he’s tackled before. Reflecting on his 12-year-old self, this eighth of fifteen children is first ostracized by his father and then kicked out of the family home to fend for himself. They never saw each other again and this trauma informs the songs contained here.
Remarkably, this isn’t an album that feels sorry for itself. Instead, Son Of A Broken Man kicks back hard with crunching riffs and monster grooves that evoke the early 1970s. With grit and dirt under their fingernails and a funky stink to match, Devil In My Pocket and Runaway From You make nods to both Led Zeppelin and Funkadelic but the sound is wholly Fantastic Negrito.
To hear him sing, ‘I’m gonna run away from you/Because you treat me so bad’ on the latter isn’t a whimper of fear but a declaration of defiance. Likewise the rock’n’soul of God Damn Biscuit sees him summoning up his inner strength as he sings, ‘No more crying/My daddy didn’t leave me a goddamn biscuit…’
But there’s tenderness too. I Hope Somebody’s Loving You filters the balladry of Stax through the prism of the 21st century with Negrito’s voice displaying the emotional cracks that come with experience as elsewhere the shadow of Sly Stone touches the funk of This Little Light Of Mine. Cherry-picking the finest musical ingredients to bolster his story, Fantastic Negrito offers redemption. ‘I am the son of a broken man’ he declares on the title track ‘I picked up the pieces and survived’. Raw and confessional, this is his best work yet.
