Fantastic Negrito performs at the UC Theatre in Berkeley on Oct. 14, 2017. Karen Goldman/STAFF. Two-time Grammy winner Fantastic Negrito is spending the quarantine with his fans. Not literally, of course. The musician, whose name is Xavier Dphrepaulezz, put out a call to his fans to send in videos…

Fantastic Negrito performs at The Fillmore in San Francisco on June 15, 2018. Photo: Karen Goldman. When 2014 began, Xavier Dphrepaulezz was a former musician. His mid-‘90s music career ended abruptly when a car accident shattered his wrist badly enough that it had to be fused and put him…

Every week, there’s a plethora of new music at our fingertips. Artists on platforms such as Spotify and Bandcamp are plentiful, and the radio offers a steady deluge of new singles, but who has time to sort through all that? RIFF does! We pooled our resources to find some of the best…

St. Lucia Looking back on my interviews over the past 12 months, the first thing that surprised me was just how busy I stayed: nearly 50 interviews of 10 minutes or longer, about a dozen more than 2015, which had seemed much busier. Interviewing artists is just one part…

Photos: Roman Gokhman SAN FRANCISCO — Temple of the Dog’s self-titled debut, their lone album, was released 25 years ago. It is as old now as Pet Sounds, Revolver and Blonde On Blonde were when it debuted in 1991. That is old enough to qualify as classic rock, as the age and…

Fantastic Negrito, courtesy. Today is a momentous day for Xavier Dphrepaulezz, in a life full of them. There was the day he was given a multi-million dollar signing bonus by one of the biggest label heads in the world. The day he blew the rest of the money, and was…