'GET HIGH' GOES ON

MTV Censors Tune But Much Has It In Regular Rotation

TORONTO - MuchMusic isn't in a huff over Afroman's "Because I Got High,"
despite MTV's decision to censor the song.

The novelty rap tune, which appears on the movie soundtrack to Jay and
Silent Bob Strike Back, has recently had radio request lines lighting up
across the U.S. and Canada and MTV fretting over its drug references.

The U.S. music video channel announced this week it had negotiated some
changes with Afroman's record label. It will play the song's video
overnight but not on the popular teen show Total Request Live.

According to Craig Halket, MuchMusic music programmer, Much has been
playing the original version of the song in medium rotation for two weeks
and will continue to do so.

"We had a meeting about it and decided that though it certainly contains
drug references, it's not a pro-drug song," said Halket. "It obviously
deals with the negative consequences of drug use."

"Because I Got High," sung by previously unknown rapper Joseph "Afroman"
Foreman, begins with the narrator lamenting, "I was gonna clean my room,
until I got high" and quickly escalates through a series of lost opportunities.

It closes with the lines: "I messed up my entire life because I got high. I
lost my kids and wife because I got high. Now I'm sleeping on the sidewalk
and I know why. Because I got high."

"It's a song about a true experience I had," says Afroman, 27, who lives in
Hattiesburg, Miss. "I was gonna clean up my room. Then a buddy came over.
He was one of my time-consuming buddies, you know? And he said, "Let's just
smoke this joint quick."

"I started messing around and got to dancing but didn't get anything done.
Then I saw a pattern: Every time I kicked it with him, I messed up in a
major way and I realized what it was."

MTV, which says it has a policy not to promote drug use, said Afroman and
Universal were willing to adjust the video for airplay. The station
wouldn't detail the changes but a record company executive said all visual
references to smoking marijuana were removed, as were some vulgarities.

Earlier this summer, MTV made the rock band Weezer change the title and
lyric of their otherwise non-drug-related song "Hash Pipe" to "Half Pipe".