Growing up as a "white boy in a black neighborhood"...Stop. I'm not here to rip off of Everclear, nor did I grow up in a "black" neighborhood so much as a "multi-cultural" neighborhood. I was nevertheless exposed to every kind of music under the sun. I preferred Nirvana and rock music, but just as I listened to and played Latin beats, I had an appreciation for rap's ability to "stop, drop," and, of course, "open up shop," as the great DMX sang before every football or lacrosse game I played in (and stunk at).
One such rap song, if it could be called that, was Afroman's tribute to marijuana, "Because I Got High." I didn't smoke, myself, but it was such a joyful song that it stuck out in my memories. Mainly, it was an excuse for teenage boys to rant and rave about getting high, and that's all it really takes. Imagine my surprise when Afroman returned to national fame in 2014,remixing his classic to put forth a positive vibe on pot legalization. I was thrilled; as an anti-Drug Warrior, it was great to see a public figure who wasn't Bill Maher making widely-played art about drug legalization.
I'm disappointed to therefore reiterate a new TMZ report that, at a concert Tuesday night, Afroman - AKA Joseph Edgar Foreman - flat-out decked a girl who had snuck up on to stage and started dancing with him. But why does this matter to national politics?
The quick version? Everything he tried to accomplish with his return could crumble if the usual media tropes are allowed to take over, with talking points and bad jokes. The long version?
Join me after the jump!
I don't have to look far to see what any news article about Afroman is going to include: References to his one hit wonder (TMZ did a particularly terrible job of making a joke out of it) are going to be endless. They will naturally rely on the, "maybe if he was high, he wouldn't have hit her" narrative, which will parallel the, "maybe if he wasn't high, he wouldn't have hit her" one.
Then there's the a phenomenon that fellow Daily Kos writer Shaun King calls "Thuggification." As King explains, Thuggification is an attempt to assassinate the character of a Black person involved in some kind of criminal situation by attributing the "thug" label to them. A casual Google search for "Afroman is a thug" confirms exactly what I've come to expect out of today's weaker media outlets: Articles like this one at Celebrity-Gossip.net are already creeping up labeling Afroman a "thug."
Whether or not "thug" behavior is viewed gloriously within the young Black community, as commentators like Charles Barkley wonder, is surprisingly relevant. Afroman's original rise-to-fame was because he sung a song about smoking weed, and whether we like it or not one of the key underpinnings of drug legislation has been that the narcotics trade is dominated by thugs. There is a serious debate as to the role of anti-immigrant sentiment in some of America's first marijuana laws, and we all know that Mexican immigrants have been "thuggified" time and again when it's politically convenient.
And now one of legalization's most well-known, well-sung proponents just punched the daylights out of some girl on stage, an act which is reprehensible and provides fuel for the "thuggification" fire.
The best argument Afroman's PR people have put out was that he reacted out of surprise when he noticed that someone was next to him on stage. He acted defensively, they argue. I'm sure there is a grain of legitimacy to this argument; usually, fans aren't allowed on stage to dance with the performer. Usually, however, it's for the protection of the performer, not the fan. He'll have his day in court, and hopefully when the dust settles he will have a fair chance to make amends and redeem himself.
As for us, however, the one thing we can't allow is for his misdeeds to become marginalized between witty quips about being too stoned to tell what was going on, and his genre of music hailing "thuggish" behavior, through and through. Mainly because neither is true.