Afroman is in a lot of trouble.
On Fat Tuesday in Biloxi, MS, a young female fan jumped on-stage during an Afroman performance and, after a moment’s hesitation, began dancing against his back as he played guitar. When she made contact with him, Afroman spun on her and punched her in the face. It was a violent, shocking altercation many fans captured on video. Following the show, he was arrested for assault, booked by police, and now faces a serious legal challenge that could result in jail time.
Make no mistake: what Afroman, real name of James Foreman, did to the woman was terrible. Instead of turning around and telling her to get off the stage or, probably better, stopping the show and asking whatever security was in the bar to get her off the stage, he resorted to impulsive, physical violence. Punching a woman is never okay, and Mr. Foreman deserves whatever the legal system has in store for him as due process plays out.
Before we rush to vilify him, though, we need to consider the context of the assault. There’s no better place to start that than by remembering Darrell Abbott.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there wasn’t an individual guitar player with a more devoted following than Darrell Abbott. You might know him better as Dimebag Darrell. Abbott founded and played guitar for Pantera, one of the most-popular heavy metal bands of all time. He was a singularly gifted player, perhaps the finest metal guitarist of his era, and by all accounts he was also a hell of a nice guy: great with fans, kind to friends, and an avid music buff who gave deference to his idols and respect to contemporaries.
Pantera broke up in the early 2000s, which led Darrell and his brother Vinny, who played the drums in Pantera, to start a new band, Damageplan. While the music differed from Pantera’s, it was still Dime up there on-stage, wailing on his signature Washburn, smiling, going crazy, and giving the people what they wanted. That is, until December 8, 2004, when, at the start of a Damageplan show in Columbus, OH, a crazed fan jumped on-stage, pulled a gun, and shot Darrell multiple times in the head, killing him and, in the ensuing chaos, three other people before being shot and killed by responding police.
Maybe you never heard that story. Or maybe you’re one of those who still can’t really talk about it. In any event, lax security allowed an individual to jump on a stage during a concert and murder one of the performers, and this for no reason other than the dude was fucked up and nuts and someone didn’t do their job. A butterfly flicks its wings, and one of the great American guitar players is murdered on-stage during a show.
Consider a performer’s state of mind, as well. Afroman, in an apology filed to TMZ after he made bail, cited anger and anxiety issues he’s been struggling with as the impetus for punching the woman, ones he subsequently asked for help in dealing with. Fans didn’t know about them, because a fan is not the same as a confidante. No casual observer knows what emotional difficulties a person may be going through. Enjoying someone’s music and wanting to see a show is not the same thing as being involved in someone’s life, regardless of the good time you’re having and the good way the performers make you feel.
A few months ago, another video of an on-stage altercation made the YouTube rounds. In this one, Fat Mike from NOFX beat down a rowdy fan who jumped on the stage at a show, first elbowing the dude in the chin and then kicking him in the face. The video is alarming if you watch only the ten seconds of violence, but if you watch the longer cut, you see that Fat Mike told the crowd he was having a neck issue, was in a lot of pain, and would have appreciated people not fucking with him. This being a NOFX show, everybody instead made a point to fuck with him, including a dude who got up on-stage, got up on Fat Mike, and got his ass beat as a result.
The next day on Twitter, Fat Mike apologized, and everyone was cool with it. Shit happens, right?
Neither the NOFX story nor what happened to Dimebag Darrell seem to share much in common with Afroman punching a woman, but there is one elemental similarity. That is, no non-performer should ever get on-stage during a show. Just don’t do it. Not unless your name’s on the marquee, you’re in an opening band, or you work at the venue. Bands and performers don’t care about a random stranger’s well-being. Something really terrible could happen, as it did with Afroman in Biloxi.
Think about it this way, too: the stage during a performance is a sacred space, sure, but more than that it is a work space. Don’t minimize the fact that these performers and bands are working. You can imbue their tasks with whatever spiritual significance you’d like, and you can drink as much beer as you want to celebrate their abilities, but when playing a show, you favorite bands and performers are on the job. You pay them for a service, and they provide it. It’s a give-and-take, a symbiotic relationship, but a fragile one containing an invisible wall that you should never, under any circumstances, cross.
Even with those forms of music, like punk and party rap, that allow a modicum of interaction and fan access not found elsewhere, don’t touch the performers unless they ask you to touch them. Don’t interfere with the show, and for the love of fuck DO NOT inject your drunk ass into a moment or performance that you were not a part of to begin with. As a fan, you’ve got two jobs: 1) don’t be an asshole, and 2) don’t fuck up the show. It’s really not that complicated.
I hope that woman is okay, and I hope Afroman is, too, eventually. He’s got a long road ahead of him, and his life’s never going to be the same. There were many ways he could’ve handled himself, and he chose by far the poorest. There will be consequences, and he earned them. But none of this had to happen. None of it was inevitable.