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Afroman

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Because he got high — the one-song folk hero whose loose, self-deprecating stoner-rap turned a novelty smash into a quarter-century touring career.

Afroman is the stage name of Joseph Foreman, born in Los Angeles in 1974. He spent time in Mississippi before growing up mainly in South Central Los Angeles and later Palmdale. His first song, a diss track about a classmate written in middle school, sold hundreds of copies among students and teachers once he started making mixtapes in eighth grade, an early lesson in how a song could stand in for him at school when he wasn't there.

He dropped out of Palmdale High School in 1991 and released his debut album, My Fro-losophy, in 1998, which went nowhere commercially. A move to Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1999, after Sell Your Dope, connected him with drummer Jody Stallone, keyboardist Darrell Havard and producer Tim Ramenofsky, who together shaped the sound that followed.

Ramenofsky produced Because I Got High in 2000 on the independent T-Bones Records, and the title track spread through Napster and concert sales before Howard Stern played it on air, turning it into a 2001 hit and a Grammy nominee. Universal signed Foreman for six albums and issued The Good Times that year, combining his earlier work with new songs.

Foreman went back to releasing music independently in 2004, mostly online, and has continued at a prolific pace since, largely outside major labels. In 2022, after Ohio sheriff's deputies raided his home and found no evidence of wrongdoing, he wrote protest songs about the incident, collected on his eighteenth album, Lemon Pound Cake; he later won a lawsuit brought by officers over the songs' use of security footage, with the ACLU calling the suit an attempt to punish him for speaking out.

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