\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div> \t\t\t\t\tThe new front gate to Foreman\u2019s Winchester, Ohio, property depicts two officers from the raid.<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMadeleine Hordinski for Rolling Stone<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\tIn 2023, seven of the officers sued Foreman for $3.9 million for invasion of privacy and defamation, among other claims. Three years later, a livestream of the relatively brief trial brought its colorful cast of characters to the world, and Foreman went viral. (\u201cI was just trying to go Cincinnati internet,\u201d he says, laughing.) The Daily Show<\/em> covered the ordeal, and everyone from progressive news outlet Mother Jones<\/em> to manosphere misogynist Andrew Tate voiced support for Foreman.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tTo many who followed the case, its absurdities counterintuitively laid bare serious issues of police accountability and governmental transparency. Foreman\u2019s supporters, including some who may not have heard of him before, have embraced the comedy rapper as a First Amendment crusader who feels as culturally relevant now, if not more so, as he did at the peak of his early-2000s fame. If nothing else, he\u2019s mastered the mercurial art of virality and emerged as one of the decade\u2019s most potent political satirists.<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n \n\t\u201cIf there\u2019s anybody you don\u2019t want to mess with,\u201d he says, \u201cit\u2019s a comedic rapper.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe morning after the show, Mother\u2019s Day, we meet at Mama\u2019s Coffee House in Winchester, Ohio, a village of around 1,000 people about an hour\u2019s drive east of Cincinnati. Foreman visits the shop nearly every day. \u201cWe got two buildings in our town,\u201d he says. \u201cThe gas station across the street and Mama\u2019s.\u201d The bakery started regularly selling lemon pound cake the weekend after the verdict, and the first batch sold out within an hour. Soon after, people started coming from hours away to buy one. A sign advertising \u201cThe Afroman Lemon Pound Cake Combo\u201d \u2014 a 20-ounce \u201clemon pound cake latte\u201d and a slice of the dessert with whipped cream for eight dollars \u2014 is displayed on the counter.<\/p>\n \n\tForeman, once again clad in one of his custom flag suits, nestles into a corner booth next to a sign that reads \u201cSit long, talk much, laugh often.\u201d Over the next several hours, looking back on how in the hell he got to this point, he will do all three.<\/p>\n \n\tBorn in South Central Los Angeles, Foreman moved to Mobile, Alabama, with his family when he was five, learning to play drums, guitar, and keyboard in his grandfather\u2019s church. They moved back to L.A. at age 11, which was educational in a whole new way. \u201cI picked up an impeccable hustling spirit,\u201d he says, but at the same time, the city exposed him to \u201cthings I\u2019d never seen before,\u201d like homelessness and cops being racist toward Black people. \u201cIt mentally toughened me up.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIf every superhero has an origin story, Foreman\u2019s begins at South Central\u2019s Raymond Avenue Elementary School. In the sixth grade, he wrote his first rap: a diss track against a rich classmate he says was \u201cbeautiful but mean.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tInspired by his father\u2019s and uncle\u2019s gifts for ragging on rich relatives, he wrote a parody rap about the girl\u2019s \u201cslight little mustache\u201d to the tune of Slick Rick\u2019s \u201cLa Di Da Di.\u201d \u201cThe whole school went crazy,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \n\t<\/p>\n \u2018They live in this little fantasy world where they bully people and get away with it.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n\tTwo years later, he started selling mixtapes that leaned heavy on storytelling raps but only hinted at the humor that would become his trademark. After a girl derisively called him \u201cAfroman\u201d at L.A. Southwest College in the mid-1990s, Foreman reclaimed the insult, showing an early penchant for turning a negative into a positive. \u201cI watched a Too $hort documentary, and he was saying how they was telling him he was too short,\u201d Foreman says. \u201cAnd he started putting it on tapes and hats and on jackets. He named himself that, and he said it worked.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tStill, his first mixtapes weren\u2019t catching on. In 1999, broke and with his house in foreclosure, Foreman, then 25, relocated from L.A. to Mississippi. He started looking less to his hip-hop peers as career models and more toward comics like Rodney Dangerfield: When in doubt, clown yourself. \u201cIt was magic,\u201d he says of rapping about his own troubles and humiliations.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThat\u2019s when, in a \u201craggedy house with a dirty sock over a preacher mic and a hairband holding it all together,\u201d stoner-rap history was made. Foreman produced and recorded all of the voices for \u201cBecause I Got High,\u201d a celebration-slash-cautionary tale about weed.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhat made Afroman different wasn\u2019t the weed. It was the perspective,\u201d says High Times<\/em> Editor-in-Chief Javier Hasse. \u201cMost cannabis music at the time treated weed as cool, rebellious, or aspirational. Afroman played a guy who blamed weed for everything wrong in his life. The joke was the narrator.\u201d\u00a0Adds famed marijuana activist Tommy Chong: \u201cThe perception before, at least what the authorities were trying to put on, is how evil people are when they\u2019re high. When [the song] came out, it was so simple and honest. He showed how ridiculous [the panic] was.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tDan McCarron was working in the A&R department at Universal Records in late 2000 when he heard about the \u201cwildfire reaction\u201d the song and album were earning. \u201cIt was the biggest demand we had ever seen,\u201d he recalls.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe label signed Foreman, and according to McCarron, the song \u201cquickly went from a couple of [radio] spins to ubiquitous. Every hour, every station was playing it.\u201d Howard Stern became an early proponent, and director Kevin Smith placed \u201cBecause I Got High\u201d over the end credits to his fifth film, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThere were multiple stories within Afroman\u2019s song with a moral and a lesson, and it was funny, and relatable,\u201d Smith says. \u201cAnd how often is there a song that makes you laugh to the point where you\u2019re like, \u2018I gotta play this for somebody else\u2019? It was a phenomenon.\u201d (To wit, in 2001, a judge sentenced a Massachusetts teenager busted with beer and a weed pipe to write three paragraphs on the track\u2019s morals. The boy said he already knew the song and found it funny.)<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\u201cThe world would have you think I\u2019m stupid, and I play into stupid,\u201d Foreman says.<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMadeleine Hordinski for Rolling Stone<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\t\u201cBecause I Got High\u201d went Number One in nearly a dozen countries, earned Foreman a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Solo Performance, and the album it was on peaked at Number 13 on the Billboard<\/em> 200. The response was so universal, Foreman recalls, that two uniformed New York cops once lit a joint and offered to smoke with him. (\u201cThis is a crooked-cop prank on me,\u201d he thought. Nevertheless, he accepted.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tUniversal quickly repackaged Foreman\u2019s biggest songs to that point for the album The Good Times<\/em> and released it on Aug. 28, 2001. \u201cI remember feeling, \u2018This is the summer of Afroman,\u2019\u201d McCarron says. \u201cHe was everywhere.\u201d Two weeks later, on Sept. 11, the national mood transformed overnight.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIf irony was dead, what luck did wanton, weed-fueled silliness have? As quick as he seemed to arrive, Afroman was gone. \u201cBy the next morning, his radio spins had gone literally to zero,\u201d McCarron says.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201c\u2018Killed\u2019 is a big word,\u201d Foreman says, laughing, when asked if he felt 9\/11 killed his career. \u201cIt hospitalized it. My career was on the bed with all the hoses and IVs and shit and the foot was in the air.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tForeman never released a major-label album again, but never stopped recording and touring. He formed his own record label, occasionally revisited \u201cBecause I Got High\u201d for remixes, and released independent comedy-rap albums with titles like Frobama: Head of State<\/em>, Save a Cadillac, Ride a Homeboy<\/em> and Waiting to Inhale<\/em>. Did he ever think about giving up after a brief, yet meteoric, taste of superstardom? \u201cI didn\u2019t quit when I was less. You think I\u2019m gonna quit when I\u2019m more? How does a cowboy stop being a cowboy? How does a rapper stop being a rapper?\u201d he says, adding, \u201cYou got to have a bad part of the movie to help you wipe tears and love it at the end. Dude, I wouldn\u2019t change nothing in my life, because my truthful story is unbelievable.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tFrom Mama\u2019s, we take Foreman\u2019s Rolls-Royce Phantom he calls \u201cNighttrain\u201d \u2014 with a custom lemon-pound-cake license plate \u2014 to the modest farmhouse he\u2019s dubbed Fro-ever-ever Land. Nighttrain, Foreman\u2019s \u201cnormal, everyday rich-man car,\u201d has many friends: a 1992 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, a 1962 Chevy Impala, a 1983 Coupe de Ville, a black Escalade, and, finally, a Rolls-Royce Ghost bought shortly after the raid. \u201cI wanted to put this car in the sheriff\u2019s face a little bit,\u201d Foreman says, smiling. \u201cIt was the first little slice of success after the raid and the album.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t<\/p>\n \u201cMost people wronged by the police just have to take it. Afroman didn\u2019t take it.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n\tForeman moved here in the mid-2000s, when he was \u201cchasing a girl and discovered some cheap land.\u201d The three-bedroom home, situated on five acres, holds a makeshift recording studio for preproduction and an upper level that highlights Foreman\u2019s near-pathological love of collecting. There\u2019s the cane collection. The fedora collection. The sunglasses collection. The pandemic-\u00admask collection. The suit collection numbering well over 100. The shoe collection (all wing tips, flamboyantly embellished with marijuana leaves, leopard print, stars, and other flair). The DVD collection (with The People vs. Larry Flynt<\/em> on top). And a chalice collection not seen since the Holy Grail scene of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWe walk downstairs to the kitchen, which, like most of the rooms in the house, is painted bright green. The walls are plastered with framed records and plaques touting Foreman\u2019s streaming numbers. There\u2019s a sign that reads \u201cDrink some coffee, put on some gangster rap & handle it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tYou may have seen this kitchen in one of Foreman\u2019s many videos posted following the raid. On Aug. 21, 2022, officers with the Adams County Sheriff\u2019s Office visited a woman in Winchester they suspected of marijuana possession, according to court documents obtained by Rolling Stone<\/em>. After finding more than four pounds of weed in her home, the woman, identified in the search warrant as Foreman\u2019s former personal assistant and ex-girlfriend, told the officers that she was \u201cholding\u201d the weed for him, according to the search warrant authorizing the raid on his home. She also claimed that Foreman\u2019s house contained a basement \u201cdungeon,\u201d where, according to the warrant, \u201che keeps women locked in, forcing them to urinate and defecate in a bucket for punishment for upsetting or disobeying him.\u201d (Property records obtained by Rolling Stone<\/em> show that Foreman\u2019s house has no basement.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tLater that evening, officers executed the raid with weapons drawn. Angie, with whom Foreman is still close, says she told the cops before they entered his home that she would give them a key. \u201cThey didn\u2019t have to destroy anything,\u201d she says. \u201cThey could\u2019ve just let me open the damn door. They thought that they was going to catch this big-league [criminal]. Joseph has lived here for years. They\u2019ve never had any issue to ever think ill of him.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn a statement, Robert Klingler, the officers\u2019 lawyer, says that \u201cthe door had already been breached\u201d before Angie arrived. \u201cThere was no offer to provide a key to the house.\u2026 The accusation that they unnecessarily caused damage to the door, or to any other property, is not true.\u201d Adds Brian Newland, one of the officers, \u201cMs. Foreman was addressed in a calm and courteous manner.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI can\u2019t get them to come out here when I get my house broken into,\u201d the rapper says \u2014 a situation he claims has occurred multiple times, prompting him to install the very security cameras that famously captured the cops in his kitchen. \u201cBut that same day they came with a Full Metal Jacket<\/em>, Beetle Bailey<\/em> infantry, Marine Corps battalion. You could have looked at the floor plan [of my house] at City Hall and realized there was no Dungeons & Dragons and secret Scooby-Doo<\/em> passages.\u201d (\u201cThe officers are unaware of any reports of break-ins by Mr. Foreman that were not followed up on, and do not believe there were any,\u201d Klingler says.)<\/p>\n \n\n
\n\t\t\u2018A Hustling Spirit\u2019<\/strong>\t<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/AFROMAN-JOINT.jpg\")
<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\t\tTurning Bad Times Good<\/strong>\t<\/h2>\n