Two-time GRAMMY® Award-winner Fantastic Negrito is back with his third album, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? As we’ve heard from the genre-fusing artist, he continues to fuse elements of hip-hop, R&B, funk, soul, and rock ‘n roll into his signature style. Inspired by and reminiscent of the socio-political albums coming from black America in the late 1960s and into the 70s, (i.e. Gil Scott-Heron and Sly Stone) Negrito explores the struggle and complexities of mental health issues while continuing his long-running lyrical examination of America’s increasingly broken social and political state of affairs. You may have already seen some of videos or heard some of the singles. In early April he released the video for “Chocolate Samurai,” featuring at-home footage contributed by fans during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in America. The clip is still streaming at Fantastic Negrito’s official YouTube channel. For the video, he started a worldwide sing-along that brought together all his fans in self-isolation.
Negrito is more versatile musically than most lumped into the category of blues yet the chorus for “How Long” will remind of Robert Plant in his Led Zeppelin days. It’s far more serious though than most of that classic rock fare. It too, has a video and it brilliantly confronts those behind school shootings, police brutality, and other acts of senseless violence. Conversely, the wildly inventive “Searching for Captain Save a Hoe (Feat. E-40),” doesn’t sound like blues at all. It’s a thought-provoking modern reinvention of the legendary Bay Area rapper’s 1993 classic, “Captain Save A Hoe.” Negrito makes his sound contemporary by integrating the original sounds of Lead Belly and Skip James with loops and samples of his own live instruments. Yet, listen to “Your Sex Is Overrated” and its searing lead guitar solo and he indeed delivers deep blues. The organ-driven “King Frustration” sounds like a modernized soul song. Additional highlights include “I’m So Happy I Cry,” featuring powerhouse vocals from Tarriona “Tank” Ball of New Orleans’ Tank and the Bangas – a historic moment marking the first-ever collaborative recording by two previous winners of NPR’s influential Tiny Desk Concert Contest. That one also has an accompanying video.
“On the first two albums I wrote about broad topics,” Fantastic Negrito says. “The proliferations of gun violence, the evil NRA, gentrification and homelessness, pharmaceutical companies that prey upon the people. On this album, I wanted to write about people I knew, people I grew up with, people whose lives I could personally affect, and whose lives have impacted me. It was the hardest album I’ve ever written. What do I want to say to these people, and to the world? If I had the chance, I would tell them the pain they are feeling, the darkness they are going through is temporary – especially if you consider the span of a human life. I would tell them we can’t fight these obstacles alone. We need each other. Get offline. Talk to people. I would tell them I am here for you. We can’t hide from the pain. We need to look right at it. To really look into someone’s eyes is to feel their power and their vulnerability, to feel humanity, and to feel love.” Given that the album was written before the George Floyd tragedy and the subsequent protests and rise of the BLM movement, we can only wonder how that may have affected some of his outlook.
Negrito may have a prescience though. Tank speaks about “I’m So Happy I Cry” this way, “…is about being so overjoyed when change finally comes from living a life of constant fear and survival. It’s the truest testament in believing not only is change gonna come, but it is here. Fantastic Negrito always told me that we would make history together. I believed him. Fantastic Negrito from a distance is plain ole weird. But when I met him, I found that he was brilliant in his own way. He believes in unity, self-determination, music, community, family and he makes you feel comfortable to be yourself and create timeless music.” Yet, Negrito claims he wrote the song the day after reading of Juice WRLD’s death. It decries mental illness as the subject at hand felt the need to self-medicate to the point where it killed him, a far too common occurrence among youth today.
No doubt Fantastic Negrito is an artist of these times, intent on being a spokesperson for social issues, some of which get far too little attention. He’s won both of his Grammy for “Best Contemporary Blues Album” but his music is so different from most other entrants that he’s in a sense carving out his own genre. Jimi Hendrix did that too. And, if two of Negrito’s major influencers are Gil Scott-Heron and Sly Stone, the industry really didn’t know how to categorize them either. Winning with such a unique approach is a testament to Negrito’s singular talent. There are few if any comparable modern-day benchmarks.
