The Last Days of Oakland Fantastic Negrito

• 1 Intro - The Last Days of Oakland 00:35
• 2 Working Poor 04:01
• 3 About a Bird 03:40
• 4 Scary Woman 03:10
• 5 Interlude - What Would You Do? 01:20
• 6 The Nigga Song 03:16
• 7 In the Pines (Oakland) 04:19
• 8 Hump Thru the Winter 03:54
• 9 Lost in a Crowd 05:00
• 10 Interlude 2 - El Chileno 00:41
• 11 The Worst 03:52
• 12 Rant Rushmore 05:01
• 13 Nothing Without You 04:16
• 14 Push Back 03:53
• 15 The Shadows 03:35
• Total Runtime 50:33

Info zu The Last Days of Oakland

The Last Days of Oakland is the second album by American singer-songwriter Fantastic Negrito. Rayanne Pinna described the album as "an urgent, political record that grapples with the many changes Oakland has seen in recent years." In 2017, it won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album.

When you listen to Fantastic Negrito, you’re invited to hear the story of life after destruction. Each song is a real story about a musician from Oakland who experienced the highs of a million-dollar record deal, the lows of a near fatal car accident that left him in a coma, and is now in the midst of a rebirth that took him from the streets of Oakland to the world stage.

"The entirety of this album is full of soul. The humming of Lead Belly´s ‘In the Pines’, to the closing track ‘Nothing Without You’. Fantastic Negrito creates a drive with his frustration, capturing a medley of musical styles, including blues, gospel and punk influences that he blends naturally. His superb lyricism oozes anger and a power throughout. ‘The Last Days of Oakland’ is an album that defines the year. As well as being a fantastic musical creation, it also contains a powerful message." (Molly Lempriere, folkandhoney.co.uk)

"Blues in the 21st century usually falls into two camps: hip revivalists raised on rock who are ready to shred and traditionalists content to confine the music on a narrow path. Fantastic Negrito -- the new persona of Xavier Dphrepaulezz, who previously pledged allegiance to Sly Stone in the '90s -- disregards this playbook by offering a fresh take on blues with his 2016 album, The Last Days of Oakland. The title alone pushes against the sweeping tides of gentrification and the album begins with a litany of what's good and bad within Oakland, a theme Fantastic Negrito touches upon throughout his album. Class and commerce aren't the only thing on his mind: The Last Days of Oakland teems with all the turmoil of urban life in 2016, a place where racial, financial, technological, and political tensions all threaten to explode. Fantastic Negrito isn't happy with certain classes being pushed to the margins but he's not pining for the past: he respects tradition -- a debt made explicit via a lithe cover of Lead Belly's "In the Pines," but heard throughout the album as he flits between jumping boogie, Dobro blues, flexible funk, and gospel -- but he uses the past as a way of framing the present. Certainly, his blues isn't limited to thundering riffs or guitar solos, but that doesn't mean that he resists the temptation of an overdriven six-string. "Hump Through the Winter" crunches with a color reminiscent of Led Zeppelin or, perhaps more accurately, Jack White or the Black Keys, a pair of millennial rockers whose blend of retro-tradition and modern sensibility is felt all through The Last Days of Oakland. What separates Fantastic Negrito from these 21st century peers is that he doubles down on funk and digitally erased cultural boundaries without losing a specific sense of self or place. There's a reason why this album is named after his hometown: it's an album about Oakland, just as it's an album about Xavier, yet this city by the Bay stands in for any other city in America, just as Fantastic Negrito speaks for anybody frustrated by the loss of humanity in this era of gentrifications." (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AMG)

Xavier Dphrepaulezz, vocals, piano, guitar, drum programming, handclaps
Masa Kohama, guitar
Tomas Salcedo, guitar
Madeline Tarquin, vocals
LJ Holoman, organ
Cornelius Mims, bass
Omar Maxwell, drums
Piwie, percussion

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 44.1kHz, 24-bit. The provided 88.2kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Xavier Dphrepaulezz
Born Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, the story of Fantastic Negrito is a testament to the transformative power of music and the importance of resilience. By now much has been made of Negrito’s unique story – his early years growing up in an orthodox Muslim household, the doomed major label deal that turned him off of the music industry altogether, the near-fatal car crash that permanently damaged his guitar-playing hand—as well as the remarkable redemption arc that began in 2015, when he won the first-ever NPR Tiny Desk Contest. In the years that followed, Negrito would go on to take home three consecutive GRAMMY® Awards for “Best Contemporary Blues Album,” share stages with everyone from Sturgill Simpson to Chris Cornell to Bruce Springsteen, collaborate in the studio with the likes of Sting, E-40, and Tank and the Bangas, perform on countless worldwide headline tours and at such festivals as Lollapalooza, Glastonbury, Newport Folk, and Bryon Bay Blues, and found the Revolution Plantation, an urban farm aimed at youth education and empowerment. Fantastic Negrito’s fifth studio album, 2022’s White Jesus Black Problems, marked the acclaimed first release on his own Storefront Records label. 2023 saw the release of Grandfather Courage, an acoustic reimagining of White Jesus Black Problems recorded with his touring band and hailed by PopMatters as “a compelling, affecting work of acoustic blues and roots music, speaking to the deep currents of blues as an American art form.”

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