Background and career
Joseph Edgar Foreman (born July 28, 1974), known by his stage name Afroman, is an American rapper, singer, and musician. His fourth studio album, The Good Times (2001), featured the singles "Because I Got High" and "Crazy Rap". "Because I Got High" was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2002 for Best Rap Solo Performance. Foreman wrote a number of protest songs to memorialize a 2022 raid of his Ohio home by sheriff's officers that yielded no charges or criminal evidence. The songs were collected into his 18th studio album, Lemon Pound Cake. Several officers sued Foreman for incorporating unflattering security camera footage of the raid into the songs' music videos. Foreman prevailed in court, arguing his work was protected by freedom of speech laws; in an amicus brief, the ACLU characterized the suit as a strategic lawsuit against public participation.
Foreman was born on July 28, 1974, in Los Angeles. He lived for a short while in Mississippi before moving to South Central Los Angeles at an early age. He later lived in Palmdale in the High Desert, briefly in Las Vegas, and then in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
The first song Foreman wrote was entitled "Hairy Carrie". Written during his time in middle school, it was a "diss song" about a student known for her harassment of fellow students' appearances.
In eighth grade he began recording mixtapes of homemade songs and selling them to classmates. He later recalled: The first tape I made was about my eighth-grade teacher. She got me kicked out of school for sagging my pants, which was a big deal back then ... I wrote this song about her and it sold about 400 copies: it was selling to teachers, students, just about everybody ... I realized that, even though I wasn't at school, my song was at school, so in a way I was still there. All these people would come by my house just to give me comments about how cool they thought the song was. Foreman performed in his church at a young age, playing drums and guitar. He dropped out of Palmdale High School in 1991. In 1998, Foreman released his first album, My Fro-losophy, which was a flop. In 1999, he released Sell Your Dope and moved to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he met drummer Jody Stallone, keyboardist/bassist Darrell Havard, and producer Tim Ramenofsky (a.k.a. Headfridge). Foreman attributes his musical success in part to leaving southern California, saying that Midwesterners and Southerners were more willing than people in Los Angeles to experiment with their taste in music.
Ramenofsky produced and released Foreman's album Because I Got High in 2000 on T-Bones Records; it was distributed primarily through local concerts and the file-sharing service Napster before the title track was played on The Howard Stern Show. The song humorously describes cannabis use degrading the narrator's quality of life. In late 2001, the song became a hit and was featured in the 2000s films Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, The Perfect Score, and Disturbia. Because I Got High was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo Performance in 2002. Foreman joined the lineup of Cypress Hill's fall festival "Smoke Out" with Deftones, Method Man, and others. Universal Records signed Foreman to a six-album deal, and released The Good Times in 2001, a compilation of Foreman's first two albums together with new songs. Foreman began releasing his music independently in 2004, mostly through the Internet, and that year, he recorded Jobe Bells, which satirized traditional Christmas songs. He was part of the 2010 Gathering of the Juggalos lineup. In October 2014, Foreman released a remix of "Because I Got High" to publicize the usefulness of cannabis, as part of the effort to legalize its sale across the United States.
On December 19, 2022, Foreman announced on Instagram that he would stand in the 2024 presidential election as an independent candidate. Foreman named Tennessee-based cannabis entrepreneur Jason Savage as his campaign manager, and Savage provided details of Foreman's political platform on Instagram shortly thereafter, citing inflation, the housing market, law enforcement corruption, and legalizing marijuana as key campaign issues. Foreman made an FEC filing on April 5, 2023. On April 20, 2026, Foreman indicated that he would seek the nomination of the Libertarian Party in the 2028 presidential election.
