Chocolate Samurai-Fantastic Negrito
Sorry. It’s been a few months since my last post. (Damn
you COVID-19!)
Although this is my first new positive music review
in a while, that doesn’t mean there’s been a lack of awesome tuneage as of late.
In fact, off the top of my self-manicured haircut, there’s absolute must-haves
like “Hero” from Weezer, “Black Dog” by Arlo Parks, San Cisco’s “On the Line,”
and almost anything from the new Hayley Williams album Petals for Armor.
Today I thought I’d offer up something I’ve been
jamming to for a couple of months now. It could very well be the best
CoronaVirus isolation song featuring a multi-dimensional groove which has the force
to override these bad times with good vibes. It’s packed-full of positive
energy, people!
This non-mainstream jam comes from Xavier Amin
Dphrepaulezz (pronounced “dee-FREP-ah-lez"), an Oakland-based
multi-instrumentalist with a colorful past.
Brief back story: Xavier grew-up in foster care,
was a petty criminal, and survived a car accident which left him in a coma for
three-weeks. Inspired by Prince’s Dirty Mind album, Xavier -- then a
young adult -- pretended to be a student at UC Berkeley so he could sneak into
music practice rooms to teach himself to play instruments. Righteous! Bonus
points for the inertia, imagination and ingenuity.
Under the new identity of Fantastic Negrito, his
last two albums earned “Best Contemporary Blues” Grammy awards (2017, 2019) and
his latest collection of tracks (Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?, out this
Summer) is well on its way for a third.
The standout track is “Chocolate Samurai,’ a
powerful performance which touches on so many vibes from blues, rock and soul
to funk, hip-hop, boogie and dance. The overall black roots musical groove, he
said, was inspired by the 1973 chart-topping single “Higher Ground,” a song
Stevie Wonder wrote before and recorded after his near-fatal car crash
and coma.
As with many of his past compositions, “Chocolate
Samurai” focuses on issues of race, class and other socioeconomic issues which falls
in sync with the resurrected Black Lives Matter movement this year. Xavier explained to music journalist Joshua M. Miller, “I think
it relates 1,000% because there's no other mental illness that destroys,
decapitates and deconstructs communities as much as racism. It's perhaps the
greatest mental illness of them all. I feel like on ‘Chocolate Samurai,’ I ask
and I say, ‘The whole world is watching, get free tonight, my people, my
teachers, my soldiers.’ It's like a rallying cry -- in my view that we seek
freedom. Freedom and peace go hand in hand, like brothers and sisters, they
need each other because you can't really have one without the other.”
Written before we became buried in a collective
collage of crises, you could say its message was unconsciously prescient. “This
record has a lot to do with honesty, and it’s hard to get honesty because we
don’t like it, I think. We say we like it, but boy is that uncomfortable.”
Not only is “Chocolate Samurai” funky AF -- thanks
to a badass rhythm section -- it’s fun AF too. Oh… and listen for some life
advice sprinkled over the track’s jazzy second act (heard only on the full version).
Preach!
