Joseph Edgar Foreman is still getting high. In a makeshift greenroom made from curtains at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Afroman, as he’s better known, inhales a blunt rolled by his videographer, who’s wearing a tight cocktail dress and clear sky-high heels. The 51-year-old rapper seems unconcerned that several thousand people are waiting for him, in a room far larger than the dive bars he’s been playing over the past two decades.
Foreman is wearing the same American Flag ensemble that he donned during his recent appearance in court (and now wears everywhere). In 2022, police officers raided his home in Winchester, Ohio, on suspicion of drugs and kidnapping. They found nothing except a jar filled with “green leafy vegetation,” THC wax, pipes, and more than $5,000 in cash. Following the raid, Foreman released a series of songs mocking the cops, rapping about having sex with their wives and their receding hairlines, among other humiliations. Seven of the officers sued him for $4 million for defamation and invasion of privacy. Foreman won, both the trial and the internet, where clips of the rapper on the stand spread like wildfire.
Going viral is Foreman’s forte, after all. He claims his biggest hit, the 2000 college kegger anthem “Because I Got High,” first introduced the concept; it’s doubtful, but he does have a knack for getting attention. As his case against the cops played out, Foreman’s cool demeanor and proselytizing about freedom of speech brought millions of listeners to his music. It didn’t hurt that the videos featured security camera footage of officers in his home. The most famous, “Lemon Pound Cake,” lampoons one who, during the raid, longingly eyed a pastry on the kitchen counter. It’s been watched nearly 10 million times on YouTube, and the cop, now known as “Officer Pound Cake,” said he was sent hundreds of pound cakes as a form of harassment.
The rapper’s court victory has also transformed him into a freedom fighter, which is why he’s in Vegas about to perform for a bunch of libertarian-lite crypto heads. The event’s programming director, Craig Deutsch, says Foreman’s “recent victory defending his right to make songs about the police who unjustly raided his home aligns perfectly with the Bitcoin mission.” The yearly Bitcoin Conference draws industry members but also middle-American couples who bought bitcoin when it was cheap and QAnon adherents who don’t trust anything too government-linked. More recently, it has become a popular tour stop for politicians looking to reach voters. President Trump keynoted during his 2024 presidential campaign; JD Vance spoke the following year. Now in its second year in Vegas, the event seems more popular than ever, despite the value of one bitcoin being down roughly $33,000 from a year ago.
The show’s emcee, Gregg Davis, enters the makeshift greenroom, now filled with smoke, and finds Foreman surrounded by his modest entourage: former pimp Bishop Don “Magic” Juan, Foreman’s emerald-suit-clad assistant, a couple other men passing blunts, and two young women in tight, shiny dresses.
“Is there anything you would like me to say to introduce you?” asks Davis.
“Say what's on your heart,” Foreman replies, “and then, you know, the hungry, hustling American dream—if you can remember that—Afroman.”
The emcee thanks Foreman for “making this room smell fantastic.” Shortly thereafter, Foreman’s manager enters to gently announce that hotel staff have smelled the weed, and they’re threatening to call the cops.
“OK, OK,” he replies, and then addresses his crew: “They want us to put the bud out. Y’all take some good hits and get high.”
Foreman has 20 minutes until he headlines the conference’s “Nakamoto” stage, named for the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. The rapper, who admits he knows nothing about cryptocurrency—and doesn’t own, let alone understand, bitcoin—pauses to gather his thoughts before he addresses the crypto-obsessed audience. Then he seems to think better of it. “You know, I'm 51 years old,” he says. “I’m just gonna go up there, and it’s all going to fall into place.”
As a kid, Foreman learned how to sing at church. By 12, he was rapping. His first song, as he tells it, roasted the class bully he encountered after moving from Mississippi to California, a pretty girl who had enough of a mustache to earn the lyrics, “Hairy Carrie ate her own cherry/That’s why her lips are very, very hairy.” As an adult he moved back to Mississippi and had just quit working at a chicken processing plant when he recorded “Because I Got High” and handed out 500 copies at a rave in New Orleans. Kids went home and uploaded it to Napster, and Foreman says it took only a few days for the song to travel the world. Universal Records (as it was called then) flew him to New York to sign an album deal in 2001. The next year, Foreman was nominated for a Grammy.
Foreman’s star dimmed soon after; he was never able to eclipse the success of a song about getting too high to “eat pussy.” He parted ways with Universal and started releasing songs online in 2004. Still, he milked the hit’s success throughout the following two decades, performing “Because I Got High” and other early hits for college students around the world. He never intended to get involved in activism, but advocacy eventually found its way into his act. “I don’t want to get anybody riled up,” he told Time magazine early in his career. “I just figured, since I’m a pothead, why can’t me and the other potheads have a little joke between ourselves.” In 2014, he wrote a “positive remix” of the song that showcased the benefits of smoking weed (“I had problems with glaucoma, but then I got high”) in partnership with the pro-cannabis activist group NORML.
But that was more about opportunity than conviction: On tour more days than not, Foreman grinds and will do pretty much whatever pays. He opened for Snoop Dogg during the 2018 Puff Puff Pass tour and performed at a Penn State house party for $2,500, playing three songs before the cops showed up. He’s gotten into his share of legal trouble, paying $65,000 and attending anger management classes for slapping a woman who got on stage with him in 2015. He also ran for president in 2024, after Ohio police raided his home but before clips from the trial went viral.
Earlier this year, elder millennials were thrilled to see an endeared figure from their keg party playlists reemerge. But no one really expected him to take on the first amendment. When asked in court if law enforcement searching his home gave him the right to poke fun at them in his music, Foreman responded: “Under the circumstance that I got freedom of speech after they run around my house with guns and kick down my door, I got the right to kick a can in my backyard, use my freedom of speech, turn my bad times into a good time.” The police wound up in his music videos lawfully, he says, by putting themselves on his cameras in the first place. It took the jury only six hours to agree. Foreman foresees writing “possibly 50 to 100” tracks about the officers who raided his home.
In general, Foreman is most successful being, in his words, “a marijuana tourist attraction,” with some political undertones. This makes him particularly compelling to the Bitcoin community. Rap, after all, is protest music, and bitcoin is, allegedly, “protest” currency. Foreman follows—very loosely—in the footsteps of past conference speakers like NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, who was pardoned by Trump in 2025 after 11 years in prison in connection with operating the dark-web marketplace.
“I think Afroman is a Bitcoiner,” says conference organizer Deutsch, “regardless of whether he is closely involved with the space.”
The morning before he headlines the conference, Foreman is teeing up at Top Golf, an entertainment complex featuring a large driving range and bars. He plays with Christopher McDonald, the actor who portrayed Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore, along with a 19-year-old Amish kid on Rumspringa who recorded a cover of Weird Al’s “Amish Paradise” with Foreman the night before, a couple of dudes from California, and Don Juan. This is all part of his paid time at the Bitcoin Conference, and as a consummate professional, he gamely shows up and does the thing, whether that’s helping an Amish kid learn how to rap or speaking to a crowd of digital currency enthusiasts whose enthusiasm he’s only just beginning to grasp.
Don Juan is there to help. He and Foreman met through a mutual friend about 15 years ago and have reconvened since at the Players’ Ball, an annual gathering of pimps that Don Juan founded in 1974 to celebrate his birthday. He calls Foreman “a gentle giant” and takes a seat next to him as the videographer hits golf balls a few feet away. (She’s still wearing heels.) Don Juan’s signature cup, which features golden female forms with bedazzled nipples, sits on the table.
“Bitcoin is rising in stock, and a lot of people are not familiar with it,” Don Juan explains to his friend. He’s bought himself crypto in the past but misplaced the keys he needs to access it. Having somebody like Foreman spread the word is “opening up a door” to people who otherwise wouldn’t have learned, he adds.
“It's gonna be hard as hell to get one bitcoin,” Foreman says when he learns that a single one currently costs about $77,000 and that in 2010, a guy bought two pizzas with 10,000 bitcoin (then worth about $41).
“So it’s like some kind of stock investment,” Foreman realizes. “If you buy it, you can just hold it, because it’s worth hella.”
Since its inception, the Bitcoin community has ballooned from a small group of cypherpunk computer nerds seeking financial transactions beyond the government’s purview into an orgy of political sycophants who want the US to stockpile cryptocurrency to increase the value. Though it has spent the past couple of years platforming mostly Republican lawmakers (who tend to be friendlier to crypto) and hawking MAGA garb, the Bitcoin Conference’s politics aren’t exactly straightforward. This works for Afroman in that he’s less partisan and more concerned with issues that impact him directly: He wants juries in family court (he’s divorced), marijuana to be legalized at the federal level (obviously), and jobs where American citizens get paid to monitor police officers (he’s a Black man in America). He’s also anti-war, against foreign aid, pro-legalization of sex work, and wants reparations for descendants of slaves.
Despite Trump’s past appearance at the conference, Foreman is not a fan. “One hundred percent immunity for police officers was a deal-breaker for me,” he says, along with the whole “the Nazis are good people” thing and the preservation of statues honoring Confederate generals. “I got all my Black issues with it,” he says.
Foreman really does stand for things, but he does it most fervently when it bolsters his own interests. During his 2024 presidential bid, he campaigned on two main platforms: legal recreational cannabis and mandatory body cameras on police officers.
Don Juan continues to extoll Foreman’s virtues. “He's electrifying right now. He wants something new, you know what I mean? And he's not just a rapper, he's a strong personality,” Don Juan says. “Afroman for president, and it’s not impossible.”
“I guarantee you this,” Foreman says. “If I was, everything would be alright.”
For three days, the massive conference floor fills up with booths advertising bitcoin-mining data centers. Men in suits mingle with dudes wearing sailor hats and bitcoin-logo face masks. In a far corner, a large afro peeks out from the crowd: It’s a mannequin wearing Foreman’s signature hairstyle, standing next to a glass case containing Foreman-signed rolling papers, a used ashtray, and his face on a dollar bill.
These are all items put up for auction by the bitcoin auction house Scarce City, which specializes in bitcoin memorabilia like old issues of Bitcoin Magazine and a harmonica set played by bitcoin booster and antivirus software pioneer John McAfee. Last year, when Ulbricht spoke at the conference, Scarce City auctioned three of his prison ID cards and sneakers. After a bidding war, one card went for 5.5 (in bitcoin), or around $371,000.
Sam Kimbrow, Scarce City’s general manager, says she followed Foreman’s trial and reached out in January to ask about auctioning off some of his items to help with his legal fees, including the iconic American flag suit he wore to trial. The 40-year-old calls amassing this collection “a millennial’s dream,” and she wants to share its significance with the “younger generation” who “need to see that artists fight for those kinds of rights.”
“We're really focused on freedom and self-sovereignty,” she says. “Afroman is literally a modern-day freedom fighter.”
When the auction closes, the suit sells for the equivalent of roughly $4,000. The ashtray sells for around $230 in bitcoin, and nobody buys the rolling papers.
The outcome didn’t really affect Foreman’s bottom line. He says he was paid “a lump sum” (though he wouldn’t disclose how much) to attend the conference and do “a whole bunch of different things” over his three days in Vegas. But he makes his primary reason for attending clear: “They said, ‘Afroman! Moneeeey!’”
On the final day of the conference, an hour before Foreman is due to hit the main stage, he sits down for an onstage interview before an elite audience of attendees who paid $12,999 for something called a Whale Pass. The session is locked down, and most press aren't allowed in. Foreman's interviewer is Tracy Hoyos-Lopez, the head of strategic initiatives at the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, who is most widely known for helping get Trump into bitcoin. The 60 or so seats fill up fast.
“I'm accustomed to the police assuming I'm a criminal. I'm patient, and I wait for them to realize I'm not,” Foreman says, responding to a question about what was going through his mind as cops raided his home.
“With your freedom of speech, you can acknowledge corruption. Then after you acknowledge it, you can address it. After you address it, you can possibly solve it,” Foreman continues. “Hopefully, it'll make a whole bunch of money to the point where I'm happy the raid happened.”
After he won in court, streaming activity of Foreman’s music catalog increased by more than 500 percent, according to Billboard, contributing to his effort to raise money toward the $20,000 in damages the rapper says police officers caused to his home.
The crowd here is all in. Under the multicolor planets inexplicably hanging from the ceiling, they gamely, and poorly, chant a little bit of “Because I Got High” and cheer when Foreman describes using real police officers who wronged him in his music videos. “The thing we love most about the United States and America and our Constitution is the freedom of speech,” Hoyos-Lopez says, wrapping up the interview, “and this man has embodied that.”
By the time Foreman closes out the Bitcoin Conference with two songs, the crowd has thinned; it’s the bitter end of a three-day event, and many have already left the Venetian. But those who stay, still occupying most of the 8,000 seats in the Nakamoto Stage room, want to see Afroman. They’re not nearly as lively as they should be for the conference’s only musical performance by a real live freedom fighter, but at least one middle-aged white woman in the front row gets up to dance.
Before Foreman starts playing, he almost forgets to make an important announcement. “Oh, man, I got high,” he says. “I forgot to tell y’all. I'm running for president in 2028.”
Through the crowd’s cheers, a lone voice yells, “Afroman for president!”
Then the artist strums the “B”-shaped guitar he’s been loaned, and begins to sing the viral hit that started it all.
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