Fantastic Negrito Celebrates No. 1 Album On Billboard Charts

Image: Fantastic Negrito via Facebook

Oakland R&B artist Fantastic Negrito has long been more than a local artist, as the one-time BART station busker won the NPR ‘Tiny Desk Concert’ series in 2015 and has kept barreling on to bigger and better things. Now we can add No. 1 Album on the Billboard charts to his impressive resume, as his latest release Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? hit the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Blues charts in August, and he received his richly deserved plaque this week amidst his drive to launch a new record label in Oakland. 

.@MusicNegrito's history on the #BluesAlbums chart:

#1, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?
#3, Please Don't Be Dead
#4, The Last Days of Oakland
#7, Fantastic Negrito (EP)

— billboard charts (@billboardcharts) August 26, 2020

And for good measure, we should add Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? just won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album last month. It’s his third Grammy, after previously winning the same award for The Last Days of Oakland (2016) and Please Don’t Be Dead (2019).

“In my heart I know that I have achieved these things by the support of the people, I mean the people that stood on the corners with me,” Fantastic Negrito posted on Facebook Tuesday. “I mean the people that tipped me at the BART stations. I know that I am here because of you and I want to celebrate this Billboard #1 plaque with you. I also must give props to my band and engineers who helped me create this album, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?. I know that I could not achieve any of these things without you all. I love most of you. Billboard Charts” 

The album’s leadoff track “Chocolate Samurai” has an incredibly moving video that has been declared a sort of unofficial anthem to get us through coronavirus and shelter-in-place. Fantastic Negrito understands perseverance, having once been in a near fatal car accident that left him in a coma for three weeks. Now he’s fully recovered and has three Grammys.

Image: GoFundMe for Storefront Records

And for his next act, Fantastic Negrito hopes to launch an Oakland-based record label called Storefront Records. “I want to run a record label from an artist’s perspective,” he says on the GoFundMe page raising money for the effort. “Storefront Records will be about collaborative works. There is so much untapped talent in the Bay Area. I want to walk in the footsteps of the unique excellence of my Bay Area predecessors.”

You can donate to the GoFundMe to launch Storefront Records, and then you’ll be a part of Fantastic Negrito’s next No. 1 album.