When Xavier Dphrepaulezz was 12 years old, he was thrown out of the family home by his tyrannical father, and tumbled through the California foster care system into a life of crime. Music threw him a lifeline, and having begun trading as Fantastic Negrito in 2014, he finally addresses that scarring relationship in the fuzzed-up alt. blues concept album, Son Of A Broken Man.
“Every song,” he explains, “I wanted it to be about how I felt about my daddy.”
Your father sounds like he was a very complicated man.
He was brilliant, but he was horrible too. Maybe he is the quintessential explanation of human beings, and how we are. Y’know, how we can cure polio and make an HIV vaccine, but then we drop nuclear bombs and put people in concentration camps.
What was it like growing up with him?
We had a huge family, but my dad kept putting all the kids in foster homes. My first memory is him telling me, about my older brother: “Don’t ever say his name.” I had brothers and sisters, and they were being kind of excommunicated. My brother is a historian now, and he goes: “Dad was a lot like Joseph Stalin.” He would ban people. And being sent off to foster homes was like being sent to a gulag.
The title track says: ‘I picked up the pieces and I survived’. Are you ever surprised that you made it?
Yeah. At times I was one step away from being on the other side of this whole thing. I remember almost smoking PCP. I was twelve, on the bus, and someone said it was angel dust, and I thought: “That sounds great.” Just by fate, man, I had to get off at the next stop. I remember being on the ground with a ninemillimeter pointed at my head…
How did you decide what style of music would suit these stories?
I think, when you start making albums in your late forties, you just don’t give a fuck. I just want to be free. Do I want to make shitloads of money? Actually, I don’t. Do I want to be super-famous? Hell no. I want to be free, with the wisdom of a grandpa and the freedom of a teenager. I’ve learnt from albums like The Beatles that what matters is a good song, not the genre. You know when Twitter asks you to describe yourself? I put: ‘Fantastic Negrito, a marketing nightmare’.
Have you found that you’re a very different type of dad?
Well, I sometimes see my dad in me. He rears his head occasionally and I’m like: “Oh shit!” I have to do the work, take the steps, calm down. I see my twelve-year-old and I’m like: “Wow, that’s when I was on the corners, selling drugs.” At twelve! My twelve-year-old is, like, a nerdy guy who wants to play video games.
What do you hope Son Of A Broken Man can help achieve?
Maybe it can help other sons of broken men. It doesn’t mean you have to become nothing, go to prison, be on drugs, pass on that toxic upbringing. I hate cycles. The neighbourhoods I came from, there’s cycles. Y’know: “They’ve done bad, their grandmother did bad, they’ve been doing bad since they came up from the South.” And I was like: “I’m stopping this, man.” I think the most important thing about this record is not passing on the mess that dad made of all our lives.
Son Of A Broken Man is out now via Storefront Records.
