Dphrepaulezz was born in western Massachusetts, the eighth of fifteen children.[9] His Bahamian[10] father masqueraded as a deeply religious Somali Muslim who, Dphrepaulezz recalls, had "a lot of rules" for his children.[11] Dphrepaulezz and his family relocated to Oakland, California, when he was 12 years old.[12] He began selling drugs as a teenager in Oakland, telling the Guardian, "We were all selling drugs, man. We all carried pistols. There was a crack epidemic. [....] I was the kind of kid who would sell fake weed [...]. Sometimes I would use tea."[11] He became inspired to teach himself how to play music after listening to Prince's album Dirty Mind and hearing that Prince was a self-taught musician. He learned to play music by sneaking into music classrooms at the University of California Berkeley despite not being a student there.[11]
Career
Dphrepaulezz signed an early record deal with Prince's former manager. In 1993, he signed with Interscope Records.[11] On January 9, 1996, he released his first album, The X Factor, under the mononym Xavier. The album was released on Lexington House Records and distributed by Interscope.[11][13] He was in a near-fatal car crash in 1999, which left him in a coma for three weeks.[3] He has said that he felt that this crash "released" him because Interscope terminated their contract with him, after which he set up an illegal nightclub in South Central Los Angeles.[11]
In 2007, Dphrepaulezz temporarily retired from music. He revived his career in 2014, adopting the name Fantastic Negrito[14] and developing a style that he calls "black roots music for everyone".[3] He released a self-titled album under that name in 2014.[8] In 2015, he won NPR's Tiny Desk Contest.[12] In 2016, his album The Last Days of Oakland was released on the Blackball Universe label.[15] Dphrepaulezz won his first Grammy in 2017, when The Last Days of Oakland received the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album.[16]
Dphrepaulezz won his second Grammy with his next album, Please Don't Be Dead, which won another Best Contemporary Blues Album award at the 2019 Grammy Awards.[17] His third Grammy in that category was awarded in 2021 for his album Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?[18] His fifth album as Fantastic Negrito, White Jesus Black Problems, was released in 2022.[19] An acoustic reworking of that album titled Grandfather Courage was released in 2023.[20] The album Son of a Broken Man, informed by Fantastic Negrito's relationship with his father,[21] was released in October 2024.[22]
