One night shortly after I first moved out back in 1996 my flat-mate brought a little gem to watch for our movie-night: a VHS tape containing a copy of a copy of a feature-length movie made with a budget of not even thirty thousand dollars, and filmed almost entirely in and around the store where director Kevin Smith actually worked. Clerks immediately became a favourite of ours, due to lines like “Chicks with dicks that put mine to shame”, the classic “I’m not even supposed to be here today”, and the films secret real stars: Jay and Silent Bob, a pair of drug dealers loitering all day long in front of the store. A whole bunch of films playing in that universe would follow, and of course Jay and Silent Bob featured in all of them. Particularly in “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back”, that has Because I Got High by Afroman as it’s theme song.
Joseph Edgar Foreman, as Afroman’s civil name is, had started writing songs in eight grade. When he was kicked out of school for sagging his pants, he made a song about the teacher inflicting the punishment and sold this to everyone at the school. While this worked quite well, he was still only ever able to sell a few hundred copies. But when file-sharing became a thing in the late nineties, what the big record companies considered the downfall of their industry turned out to be a boon for small artists like Afroman.
Because I Got High, written in all of a couple of minutes – about the span of attention the protagonist could muster – went what we would call viral these days on Napster, and soon enough the song was played on the Howard Stern show. It became a huge international hit and the most downloaded ringtone in 2002. As so many artists, despite releasing many albums and being active to this day Afroman never was able to make quite such a splash again.
The video of course features Jay and Silent Bob.
Yes, Director Kevin Smith is Silent Bob.