Twenty years after the world memorized his phone number, the Houston legend is lighter, calmer and weirdly into the tax code. He’s still doing what he’s always done best: being Mike Jones.

Mike Jones shows up in Los Angeles looking healthier than he has in years, calm and confident, and wearing a jacket in the California heat. There’s a reason for the jacket, he laughs. He’s been putting in the work on his weight-loss journey.

“I’ve been really trying to get it right and get it together,” he says with a smile.

For the artist whose “Still Tippin’” helped define an era of Southern hip-hop, longevity isn’t a given. Plenty of his early-2000s peers faded into nostalgia. Jones still tours, still records, still has fans who never left. Before every show, the routine starts the same way.

“I pray to God,” he explains. “I thank the Lord for me being able to still be here this long and the fans still appreciate me and what I lay down and what I’m doing still.”

That gratitude runs through everything, cannabis included. Asked how much he smokes in a day, he just grins. As for the internet’s favorite debate, brushing your teeth before or after smoking, he doesn’t hesitate.

“Before, during, and after.”

Only Mike Jones could make dental hygiene sound like a lifestyle.

On the best cannabis in America, there’s no hesitation either.

“Cali for sure.”

High praise from a Texas legend. But for Jones, the session is less about the flower than the company. Asked about his biggest pet peeve when he’s smoking, his answer has nothing to do with someone hogging the blunt.

“Somebody who ain’t motivated.”

For him, the room matters. Cannabis is part of a productive environment, not an excuse to sit still.

The sense of humor is intact, too. Asked what’s at the top of his playlist that isn’t one of his own, he answers with his signature hit.

“Back Then They Didn’t Want Me.”

The punchline lands because everyone already knows the next line.

More revealing is the lesson he says changed everything. Not music, not fame, not cannabis.

“Learning the IRS tax code.”

Understanding taxes, he says, changed how he approached wealth, moving him from earned income toward passive income.

“It’s not what you make,” he explains. “It’s about your classification.”

It’s the answer of a man thinking about ownership and generational wealth, not just the next record.

And when the session leads to snack time?

“Crunch n’ Munch.”

These days, it looks like a jacket in the California heat, a workout before the interview, a working knowledge of the tax code and a session full of people who actually want to do something. Twenty years after “Still Tippin’,” Mike Jones is still here, still tipping, and apparently flossing before, during and after.

<p>The post Mike Jones Can’t Smoke With Unmotivated People first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Mike Jones Can’t Smoke With Unmotivated People appeared first on Paradise Found.

On Brightside, the eldest Marley finally wrote the song about his father he’d avoided for four decades, and found a better relationship with himself in the process.

The first time Ziggy Marley was on set for the 2024 Bob Marley: One Love documentary about his father, he got a “creative jolt.” So much so, he was inspired to make another album, Brightside, a dense, nine-track spiritual experience that doubles as medicine for the soul. Co-produced by his brother Stephen Marley and recorded in the 432 Hz frequency for meditation, the project includes songs like “Sweet Divine” and “Racism is a Killa,” and they uplift as much as they educate, much like Bob’s music does. As Bob’s eldest son, Ziggy had 12 years with his father and absorbed a lot of life lessons that were passed down to him.

Ziggy, a spitting image of Bob, had to tap into those years for “Many Mourn for Bob,” a song that acknowledges both his father’s imperfections and the seismic impact he had on the world as well as his own grief over losing his father to cancer in 1981. It’s a topic he doesn’t seem to shy away from, and there’s a sense the song was just as cathartic to write and sing as it was for his audience to hear. It was, after all, the first time he’d ever written a song specifically about his father.

“It was emotional,” he tells High Times of writing it. “It was emotional going back into my memories and into some things that I didn’t want to think about for a while. Also, connecting with him on a spiritual level in that way with this song, I would still have a strong connection, so it was emotional, but it was a very positive experience though.

“Even though it’s a melancholy type of story, it was positive because we understand existence goes beyond what we are taught is ‘real’ or what is ‘physical reality.’ There’s another reality we experience through creating songs, and through a song like that, it gives me a stronger connection to him and a way to understand him more.”

In many ways, Ziggy considers the song a collaboration with his father. He explains, “When I finished that song, I was like, ‘This is my father’s song.’ He wants people to understand that everything is not how it seems. ‘I am a man, I am a human being, I’m going to go through some things, too, emotionally and mentally.’ You think Bob is a machine or some kind of mythical figure or whatever, but the more people understand the human side of him, please have respect and pay respect to that and understand what he went through, understand him in that way also.”

Bob Marley died at only 36 and Ziggy, now 57, makes a conscious effort to prioritize his physical and mental health. In fact, prior to hopping on Zoom, he’d just completed a workout.

“I just finished exercising this morning, just before we talked,” he says. “I do swimming, lifting, jogging—I do everything. Everything I feel like doing, I do. For me, it’s very important because the physical activity—and I see it with my kids—is also helping the mental state of mind and the emotional state of mind. Everything is connected and works in balance with each other. If we’re missing a piece of it, then it’s going to affect the other piece of it, which affects the other piece of it and so on and so on.

“The physical exercise is not just about physical health, but the whole health of me as a human being. And it’s not even about exercising. It’s about doing stuff in the garden, getting up for a walk, cleaning up the garage or moving a box here. It’s about not being sedentary.”

Balance has been key to Ziggy’s life these days, especially when recording Brightside. He never forced it and instead, waited until the timing felt right. His first solo effort since 2020’s More Family Time, Brightside arrived in 2024 and went on to win the Grammy for Best Reggae Album.

“I’m getting older,” he explains. “Things come into a different perspective as my consciousness grows, my emotional health grows and my mental state grows. It took that time. I’ve always believed in everything happens in its timely manner. When it’s supposed to happen, it happens. I flow that way.

“Everything fell into place for this record, including building a new studio, having my own space, trying different frequencies in music and being more educated in the science of music, because music is a science as well as an inspiration. I found a balance of science and inspiration that I put into this record.”

Naturally, he benefited from the process, too. Throughout the songwriting and recording process, he was able to tear down some of the barriers he puts in place that typically keep his private life private.

“I felt like I got a better relationship with myself on this record,” he says. “I was very certain of the direction I wanted to go in. I was very in touch with my emotional and mental state of mind. I’m a very introverted person in terms of my personal life, but I was willing to share some of that with people out there.”

Though Ziggy has written songs about cannabis in the past, including 1999’s “One Good Spliff” and 2011’s “Wild and Free” with advocate Woody Harrelson, Brightside is devoid of that. It seems to signal a shift in his perspective on marijuana and how it’s cultivated in the United States.

“I’m not sure about the corporatization of it,” he says. “Let’s compare it to food. Back in the day, people used to farm food and then it became this big industry. Now it’s being farmed in a very unethical and unfriendly way to the earth. They do all type of things to preserve it, make it taste better, make it look better and make it smell better.

“We’ve got to be careful with herb because herb is a natural plant. If we corrupt that, then it is a detriment to what the purpose of the plant is.”

Ziggy Marley

“Same thing with herb, because nature is just like food. The best food of nature is in its natural state—not how man manipulated it to include GMOs and all that. That’s the same concern I have with cannabis.”

Ziggy is much more interested in how the hemp side of the plant could be used to replace paper, serve as fuel and support other environmental purposes.

“The funny thing is that herb is supposed to be used for more than just for smoking,” he says. “We still need to explore the plant more. We cannot stop exploring it. There’s so much more potential to this plant that is still left. To explore that, we need to get into the future.”

Ziggy is currently on the Brightside Tour in support of the album and will embark on the Dreaming the Same Dream Tour with Gov’t Mule in September.

“My dream is really to see a better world,” Ziggy says. “That’s a dream we have. We’re trying to be a part of that through the music, through life and through interactions with other people. We would really like to see the world move on from this state. We’re in a time now where even though it seems to be this way, on the bright side, a lot of things are being revealed to us that were hidden. It’s like, ‘Oh, I see you now.’ That’s the bright side.”

<p>The post ‘This Is My Father’s Song’: Ziggy Marley on Grief, Bob, and His Fear of Corporate Weed first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Three years after a ruptured artery in his lung nearly killed him, Krayzie Bone is back with a renewed sense of purpose, a new Bone Thugs-n-Harmony album in the works, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star on the way, and, notably, no weed in his life anymore.

Bone Thugs-n-Harmony are one of the only rap groups in history to have collaborations with both The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Sprinkle in tracks with Snoop Dogg, Big Pun, Mariah Carey, Phil Collins, Eazy-E and Busta Rhymes, and it’s no mystery why the Cleveland natives are consistently mentioned among the hip-hop greats.

“It ain’t like we did it on purpose, that’s just the way it happened,” Krayzie Bone says. “It’s a wonderful thing to have that résumé and be able to work with artists that are legendary as well. That just solidifies our legacy.”

Bone Thugs’ legacy was set in motion with the 1994 release of Creepin’ on Ah Come Up, the group’s Ruthless Records debut. The eight-track EP included the singles “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” and “Foe tha Love of $” featuring the label’s founder, N.W.A legend Eazy-E, which helped push the project to No. 12 on the Billboard 200.

But before Bone Thugs could release their sophomore effort, E. 1999 Eternal, Eazy-E died from complications stemming from HIV/AIDS in March 1995, prompting the group to reimagine an older song of theirs, which would eventually become their first No. 1 hit, “Tha Crossroads.” The track debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 then jumped to the top, where it remained for eight consecutive weeks. It later won a Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group.

Bone Thugs, Krayzie Bone, Layzie Bone, Bizzy Bone, Wish Bone and Flesh-n-Bone, has remained active over the last 30 years building their brand, touring, recording and tackling everything life throws at them. In late 2023, Krayzie Bone nearly died from a ruptured artery in his lung, which doctors say was caused by holes in his lungs related to sarcoidosis. He was hospitalized for several days and put in a medically induced coma. He managed to survive and emerge from the incident with a renewed sense of purpose.

A New Chapter, A New Album

He also got back to work. In 2025, Bone Thugs signed a deal with Greenback Records, a label venture co-founded by UFC fighter Conor McGregor. Their latest single, “Awww Shit,” was released in December of that year, signaling a new chapter for all five MCs. Now, they’re cooking up another group album.

“We in the studio working,” Krayzie says. “We got like maybe two more sessions to get in to critique and finish up everything, but it’s been going really well. The chemistry has been there. We’re just waiting to set up the structure for the whole rollout.”

“Awww Shit” boasts more than 1.2 million views on YouTube, a testament to their staying power.

“The connection made with our fans all those years ago was a real connection,” Krayzie says. “It wasn’t nothing fake about it. It wasn’t gimmicky. It wasn’t a fake image. It was just us, and that resonated with people because it was real. We didn’t come out with a gimmick. We didn’t come out with none of that. We just came out with our style. That’s all we did and changed the game a little bit.”

Krayzie is being modest. Bone Thugs essentially invented and popularized a rapid-fire “chopper” style of rapping combined with melodic harmonizing. They’ve influenced a slew of artists in their wake, from Kendrick Lamar, who sampled “Notorious Thugs” on 2015’s “Hood Politics,” to J. Cole, who borrowed from “1st of the Month” for 2011’s “God’s Gift.”

Why the “Budsmokers Only” Rapper Put the Weed Down

But as time has gone on, Krayzie Bone, now 52, has matured in ways that have drastically shifted how he both raps and lives, which is evident on his latest solo album, 2024’s Chasing the Devil: Chapter 2 Salvation. Even before his near-death experience, the pen behind songs like “Buddha Lovaz” and “Budsmokers Only” had put the weed down. The medical emergency only strengthened his resolve.

“It had a lot to do with it, but I was already on that journey and making that shift before it even happened,” he explains. “I had quit smoking weed before already. I was reflecting on everything and looking at the times we were living in and I’m like, ‘Yo bro, I’m a grown man.’ What I look like putting out here to these younger generation stuff that I used to do as a youngster when I see what kind of damage it has done. All that played a factor. I’m in my 50s now. I’m not about to be talking about the same thing I talked about when I was 20. I had a whole different mentality. I was young, dumb and out of control.”

He continues, “Now I move with way more precaution. I think before I move. Everything just ain’t up or spontaneous. I’m not swinging blows just to strike the air these days. I’m aiming my blows directly so that when I’m trying to hit something, I hit the target for real.”

The Next Mission: Cleveland

That includes giving back to his hometown of Cleveland. Krayzie’s nonprofit, the Spread the Love Foundation (STLF), is a priority these days. As stated on its website, STLF’s purpose is to “advance urban youth development and criminal justice reform, provide community services for vulnerable families, promote cultural equity for hip-hop culture and support mental health wellness for nonprofit professionals.” Krayzie considers it his next chapter.

“Helping to revitalize the neighborhood and things like that, that’s what I’m into now,” he says. “That’s the next mission in life for me. It’s a wonderful thing. One thing that really made me happy is seeing the people of the community and how much they appreciate it. I know a lot of people probably thought, ‘Oh yeah, they not never coming back here.’ But the whole time, I’ve been just trying to figure out how to go back. Earlier in our careers, it wasn’t the time. We was young. We didn’t have the mindset to stay in one place. It wouldn’t have went the right way if I would have done it back then, but now I’m settled and I can focus on different things. Now is the time to make an impact on the community.”

Cleveland is reciprocating that love. In 2023, Bone Thugs’ old stomping grounds near the intersection of E. 99th Street and St. Clair Avenue was renamed Bone Thugs-n-Harmony Way by the City of Cleveland. Then on July 8, 2026, Bone Thugs will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a momentous occasion for the once motley crew.

“That’s gonna feel so cool to look down and see that name, along with all these other names that have made history,” he says. “Everybody I talk to from Cleveland said they’re going to be there. I got a feeling our Hollywood star ceremony is going to turn into a show or something. It’s going to be a celebration and a time for Bone to reflect and just look at everything we’ve done, where we’ve gone and what’s next in the future.”

Next up is a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is headquartered in Cleveland. For an artist to be eligible, their first album must be at least 25 years old. E. 1999 Eternal crossed that line in 2020, making a nomination long overdue.

“It would be huge to us because we’re actually from Cleveland,” he points out. “To make it in that would be a great thing, but I’m really not tripping. Every time it’s another rap group or a rapper, our fans always hit us talking about like, ‘Wow, I see they skipped you again.’ But Wu-Tang Clan is in this year, and I’m happy for them. If our day come, it come.”

Bone Thugs will serve as support on the upcoming Wu-Tang Forever: The Final Chamber Tour. The 26-date run kicks off August 27 in Darien Center, New York, and wraps up October 4 in Phoenix, Arizona.

<p>The post Krayzie Bone Nearly Died, Put the Weed Down, and Found a New Purpose. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony Are Back. first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Krayzie Bone Nearly Died, Put the Weed Down, and Found a New Purpose. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony Are Back. appeared first on Paradise Found.

Rolling Stone just told the story of how Afroman turned a botched police raid into a viral hit and a First Amendment win. Here is the piece that did not fit in that story: why the song that made him famous a quarter century ago lands harder now than it did then.

Rolling Stone just published a terrific long read on Joseph Foreman, better known as Afroman, and his unlikely second act. In 2022, at least nine officers from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office raided his Ohio home on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping. No arrest, no charges. Foreman turned the security-camera footage into a string of mocking music videos, the officers sued him for nearly $4 million, and in March a jury cleared him on every count. The novelty rapper came out the other side a free-speech folk hero.

We covered this from the start, both the 2022 raid that set it off and the verdict that turned it into a movement. When Rolling Stone’s Jason Newman reached out for the feature, the conversation ran long, and some of it landed on the cutting-room floor. The part that got cut is worth expanding, because it is about the song, not the trial.

The Joke Was Always the Narrator

By 2001, cannabis was already deep in the bloodstream of popular music. Cheech and Chong. Cypress Hill. Snoop and Dr. Dre. Rick James, Peter Tosh and Bob Dylan before them. What made Afroman different was not the weed. It was the point of view. Most cannabis music of the era treated weed as cool, rebellious or aspirational. Afroman played a guy who blamed weed for everything wrong in his life. The joke was the narrator.

That is also why the song traveled so far outside cannabis culture. Different audiences heard different songs. Stoners heard a comedy anthem. Everyone else heard something close to anti-weed propaganda, a catalog of missed classes, missed court dates, wrecked relationships and slow self-destruction. Both sides thought the song agreed with them. That tension is what carried “Because I Got High” to Number One in nearly a dozen countries and a Grammy nomination.

The Song Aged in Reverse

Here is the strange thing about the song. It got better as the culture changed around it. Twenty-five years ago, a lot of people genuinely believed weed automatically turned adults lazy, irresponsible or dysfunctional. Today, millions of adults have their own experience with cannabis, and the public conversation is more nuanced. So the song no longer plays like a warning. It plays like a guy comically blaming weed for the ordinary business of being human.

That is part of why the revival connected. The prohibitionist arguments the song parodied in 2001 are back in 2026, almost word for word. Weed makes you stupid. Weed makes you violent. Weed makes you immature. We have spent the last several months at High Times answering those claims one by one, from the people who built careers predicting weed would destroy America to the New York Times ignoring the real-world evidence, from the Wall Street Journal tying teen use to legalization even as the DEA reports teen use falling, to the pretense that teens just discovered the plant and the weaponized hype around cannabis vomiting syndrome. The data does not support any of it. So the joke lands harder now, not softer. The audience is more cannabis-literate, and the prohibition pitch sounds more like a sketch than a study.

Same Voice, New Target

What Afroman did with “Lemon Pound Cake” and the rest of the raid songs was take the same comedic voice and point it somewhere new. In 2001 he made himself the joke. In 2026 he made the raid the joke. Same humor, different target.

There is a neat symmetry in that, and it is the whole story in one line. The 2001 Afroman wrote a song about being too high to make it to court. The 2026 Afroman made it to court and won.

<p>The post The Weed Moral Panic Afroman Mocked in 2001 Is Back. His Song Aged Into a Weapon. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Muck Sticky, the Memphis rapper who has lived in pajamas for 24 years, opens up about weed, creativity and radical self-acceptance. As he prepares to launch his own cannabis brand, the independent artist reflects on comfort and resisting a culture obsessed with productivity.

In a world seemingly governed by algorithmic cynicism, the mind-numbing laconicism of young people raised on “Brain Rots,” and the normie pose (the more “normal,” the better), encountering a guy who has been, hold on to your horses, living in pajamas for twenty-four years is not just an eccentricity: it is, also, an act of resistance. Someone who one day got up and said “no.” Someone who, twenty-four years later, continues to get up to say “no” and “no.” In fact, here’s a truism: Muck Sticky, the man placidly dressed in the pajamas in question, is not a conventional artist. His music blends Memphis hip-hop, absurdist comedy, and a symbiotic relationship with weed.

Meanwhile, while the rest of humanity squeezes itself into tight jeans, succumbs to the anxieties brought forth by hyper-productivity, and falls prey to the banal sentimentality of gym bros and finbros, Muck Sticky floats effortlessly. “I’m totally cool with people making fun of me because I don’t care what they think,” he declares immediately. He doesn’t give those people the time of day.

His aesthetic, which he himself defines as a “world record” for comfort, serves as the wrapping of a philosopher of well-being who understands that true rebellion today is, simply, being happy. Or as happy as one can be. And this article could end right here, and that would be fine. It would be enough. But his is a conscious and cultivated happiness. An architecture of optimism that is felt even in the face of adversity.

Muck seems like an honest and down-to-earth guy. He greets people with “bud” and treats everyone kindly, minus the LinkedIn-style arrogance. However, he admits that it’s not always easy to stay upbeat in a world where everyone seems focused on the negative. He says, “I often find myself wondering if it really makes any difference to spread love and good vibes… Just knowing I can help people in some way keeps me optimistic about life and the future.”

That impact is what brings things full circle for him. And in this framework, weed ceases being just recreational and becomes a frequency regulator. “Cannabis has a major impact on my ability to choose what I focus on in life, and helps me connect with others,” he confesses. He doesn’t ignore the world’s tragedies, but prefers not to be held hostage by them. A wise decision, one might say. “Choosing a brighter outlook is so important, and it’s easy to get distracted by all of the horrible things going on in the world. I don’t ignore the fact that there are a lot of problems in life, but our ability to look for the good things and have hope for better days is essential to good mental health,” he maintains.

A Connection With The Plant, Now A Brand

He also feels a deep connection with the plant, which has been evolving into a tangible project that will be launched this year. “We’re actually working on that right now,” he says about launching his own cannabis brand, a process where he personally makes sure every detail is authentic. “I have ‘Final Cut’ when it comes to choosing the details. I have such a wide appreciation for so many different tastes, smells, and effects. It’s difficult to say which elements are my absolute favorites. So I’m excited we are going to have a few different options to select from,” Muck explains.

“Hopefully our pre-rolls will be exclusively wrapped in RAW papers,” he envisions. His cannabis palate is a blend of sophistication and nostalgia: “I’m a big fan of stinky cheese and fruit/berry strains. I remember getting the old school Blueberry back in the late nineties. It was so tasty and made me feel so good. So whatever we release will bring good feelings, because that’s what the music does.”

And so, as he deepened his relationship with cannabis, he understood that the reasons it was considered “forbidden” didn’t really hold up. For him, exploring one’s own psyche is a right, and weed was the conduit that allowed him to connect with his creative source. Although he acknowledges that different strains produce different effects, he believes the secret lies in letting go of the gaze of others. “My particular experience has taught me that letting go of external opinion is the root of making good art,” he states.

“I make music and art because I like the way it sounds or looks. If other people dig it, that’s cool too. But I don’t care if they do or not. In fact, I know some aren’t going to,” he continues. This philosophy of absolute independence defines him as a “loner stoner,” a solitary smoker who finds sanctuary in the early hours, with headphones on and a joint lit. “No distractions. Just me and the music. Connecting to the spirit of the music, for me, is usually a solo adventure,” he explains.

The Most Independent Man In Hip-Hop

This autonomy is not only artistic but also structural: Muck is a pioneer of independent production who owns 100% of his catalog, a privilege that began in the MySpace days, in 2004, and led him to play at the legendary Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. Furthermore, his ultra-independent approach led him to break records in 2024 when he earned a Guinness World Record for, wait for it, “the most albums released on the same day by a single artist.” Fun fact: that meant releasing around ten albums in a single day. Today, that same intense dedication has led him to launch his own cannabis brand, where he seeks to recapture classic sensations like those of Blueberry from the late nineties. “I do miss the days of CDs.”

But his message goes beyond a product. It’s a proclamation against the “guilt” that still lingers around cannabis culture. “There seems to be a lot of rules and terms you have to use amongst some people in the cannabis community, or else they consider you a bad stoner who is setting a negative example,” he criticizes. For him, all cannabis use is preventative medicine, even if its sole purpose is to alleviate stress, because stress itself is detrimental to physical and mental health. “People from all walks of life should be able to enjoy cannabis without having to explain themselves to others,” he maintains.

The Pajamas Are The Point

Born and raised in Memphis’s musical heritage, the grandson of a musician who played with legends like Elvis and Johnny Cash, Muck has rhythm in his blood, but he’s filtered it through a lens of absolute freedom. Moreover, his uniform, his pajamas, is no joke. They are, indeed, his second skin, a commitment to comfort he’s maintained for twenty-four years and a thousand pairs of pants. Especially that favorite pair with the face of his cat Sugarpuss printed on them, who now accompanies him in his creative processes from somewhere beyond.

The pajamas are also a functional tool for his explosive live shows. And he insists he couldn’t pull off his “famous flying kicks” under the tyranny of jeans: “Have you ever seen my leg kicks when I run and jump around on stage? There’s no way I could do that in jeans.” Muck Sticky is a constant reminder that authenticity is the most potent stimulant. If a guy in pajamas, singing rhymes that celebrate life, could build an empire of positivity, maybe the rest of us can too. “My goal has always been to make music that inspires people to not only laugh and have fun, but to also love and believe in themselves and their ability to make a good life. I hope people will recognize that if this goofy dude wearing pajamas and singing silly songs can make something of himself and enjoy his life, that they can make something of themselves and enjoy their lives as well,” he adds.

Meanwhile, Sticky’s resistance isn’t against the system (oh, the system!), but against the obligation to optimize ourselves to the point of exhaustion. As the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, widely quoted these days by Generation Burnout (the burnt-out millennials and Gen Z), points out in The Burnout Society: “Today we don’t exploit ourselves for others, but for ourselves under the illusion of freedom.” In this scenario, Muck’s pajamas stand not as a mere sleepwear garment, but as the armor of someone who decided to reclaim true freedom: the freedom to be nothing more than oneself, to move at one’s own pace, and to “clean the filter,” perhaps the best of all the truths he deals in.

<p>The post Muck Sticky Has Worn Pajamas For 24 Years. He Says Weed And Comfort Are The Last Real Freedom. first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Muck Sticky Has Worn Pajamas For 24 Years. He Says Weed And Comfort Are The Last Real Freedom. appeared first on Paradise Found.

Pepper’s drummer reflects on Point Break Festival, reggae-rock’s traveling family, growing up around Hawaiian cannabis, Sublime’s influence, and why the best shows feel more like backyard jams than festivals.

Pepper drummer Yesod Williams did not talk about Point Break Festival like it was another square on the summer tour calendar. To him, bringing Pepper, Sublime, Slightly Stoopid, Less Than Jake, and the wider reggae-rock orbit onto a beach felt closer to a family reunion. The location changes. The food changes. The local characters change. But the same tattooed, sunburned, weed-friendly caravan keeps following the music from coast to coast.

Pepper returned to Point Break Festival after playing its inaugural year in 2024. Williams remembered the first edition as unusually dialed-in for a new festival, especially considering how quickly an oceanfront party can turn into a logistical yard sale.

“There’s so many moving parts to a music festival,” Williams says. “First year is always working some kinks out, ironing some wrinkles, and it was amazing.”

Ahead of the band’s return to Virginia Beach, he expected fewer boundaries, more guest appearances, and the kind of Pepper set where the band members might spend as much time in the crowd as they do behind their instruments.

As Williams puts it, “If you really want to feel like a part of a show and not just at a show, just come check out the Pepper set.”

Point Break Brought the Whole Family to the Beach

Pepper’s return marked the band’s second Point Break appearance. Williams believed the festival worked because it understood that reggae rock operates as a community before it operates as a genre.

“Anytime you can get this reggae rock scene on the beach together with all the people that are what we call our fans, our whole world is an ohana,” he says. “It’s a family. It’s the Pepper ohana.”

That family stretches well beyond Pepper. Ahead of the weekend, Williams expected the bands to bleed into one another’s sets, with musicians from Slightly Stoopid, The Elovaters, and elsewhere moving across the stage without much ceremony. It is the opposite of a tightly sealed festival environment where artists arrive, play, and vanish into black SUVs.

“You’re going to see all the bands onstage with each other,” Williams says. “We have so much fun together.”

He calls the approach kanikapila style, a Hawaiian tradition of sitting around with friends and family and playing music. In Williams’ telling, the reggae-rock circuit has turned that backyard custom into a roaming festival culture.

“It’s just turned into one big kanikapila,” he says.

Point Break also got a jolt from Less Than Jake, whom Williams affectionately calls Pepper’s “old-school Warped Tour uncles.” Their presence widened the festival’s frame and reconnected the lineup to the punk and ska circuit that helped Pepper find its footing.

“Huge respect to Point Break Festival for going a little bit outside of the box too and bringing a little added spice into the festival,” Williams says.

A Pepper festival set runs shorter than the band’s headlining show, which means fewer detours and less room for deep cuts. Williams said the band may get 45 minutes to an hour at a festival, compared with roughly 90 minutes on its own stage.

Still, a compressed set can carry its own charge, especially when friends start appearing from the wings.

“It’s like going on a fishing trip,” Williams says. “It’s super epic and rad by yourself, but, man, if you got some buddies there, it just kind of hypes up the energy that much more.”

The Coast Changes, but the Crowd Travels

Williams had a fresh East Coast-West Coast comparison. Pepper had recently played Petco Park in San Diego with Sublime and Slightly Stoopid, two bands that also sit at the center of the Point Break universe. He notices regional differences, but they tend to show up in the margins rather than the spirit of the crowd.

“You’re going to get your different foods. You’re going to get kind of your different styles and just different little touches of culture,” Williams says. “But I think the attitude and just the overall personality of the people that are coming to these shows and spreading these vibes are pretty similar.”

The fans travel too. That mobility has helped turn reggae rock into a durable culture with its own routes, reunions, and generational handoffs. People follow the bands from California ballparks to Virginia beaches because the shows offer more than a sequence of songs. They offer recognition.

Pepper’s new single, “End of the World,” features The Movement, another band from that extended circle. Ahead of Point Break, Williams said attendees could expect new music, surprise guests, and perhaps a close encounter with Pepper guitarist and vocalist Kaleo Wassman or bassist Bret Bollinger in the crowd.

During the recent Petco Park show, Williams lost track of his bandmates for several minutes during the set.

“It was absolutely glorious,” he says.

That loose, participatory instinct goes back to the band’s origins. Pepper did not emerge from a strategy session about marketable genre fusion. The group grew out of Hawaii, surf culture, reggae, punk records, and parties where nobody bothered to draw a clean line between audience and performer. Point Break gave the band another chance to recreate that chaos at scale.

Sublime Showed Pepper the Door Was Open

Reggae surrounded Williams growing up in Hawaii. UB40 played everywhere, and Jawaiian music had already fused Jamaican influence with Hawaiian musicianship and island life.

What Williams needed was a way to connect that foundation to the punk and alternative music ripping through surf videos in the 1990s. The Police and The Clash offered early clues. Then Sublime made the combination feel completely natural.

Williams first heard Sublime’s cover of the Descendents’ “Hope” in Taylor Steele’s surf film Momentum 2. The song sat comfortably beside bands like Pennywise and NOFX. Williams did not yet know it was a cover, and he did not understand how far Sublime could stretch. Then a friend returned from the mainland with 40oz. to Freedom and played “Don’t Push.”

“I’m like, what? This is the same band that did that punk rock song?” Williams says.

That revelation cracked open Pepper’s future. Sublime treated punk, reggae, dub, ska, and hip-hop as parts of the same language. Williams realized Pepper could do the same without cutting itself into separate pieces.

“Oh, wait, we can play songs with punk rock in them and reggae in them, and we can do all these things,” he recalls thinking.

Sublime also brought Williams back to the drums. He had started playing at nine, quit around 12 or 13 after burning out, and turned his attention toward surfing. Then he heard the live album Stand by Your Van. The recordings sounded like small rooms on the edge of losing control.

“They sounded like parties,” Williams says. “I was like, I want to play music again, and I want to play parties around Kona.”

Soon after, he connected with Wassman at a beach party. Pepper followed. That history makes sharing festival bills with Sublime deeply personal. Williams recently thanked drummer Bud Gaugh for the inspiration and reflected on how Sublime’s surviving members lost the chance to tour behind the band’s 1996 self-titled album after Bradley Nowell died.

“They didn’t get to experience the glory from it,” Williams says. “Going out and flying the flag of that record and playing those songs for all these beautiful spirits that love it.”

Seeing that lost time reclaimed, he says, has become another “pinch-me moment.”

Cannabis Has Always Been in the Room

Cannabis entered Williams’ life long before dispensary shelves, celebrity brands, or festival smoke clouds. His parents moved to Hawaii in the late 1970s to grow weed. Some of his earliest memories involve the smell of cannabis drying around the house.

“It was never like a real taboo, like, ‘Don’t look at it. Don’t touch it,’” Williams says.

That openness helped him avoid the fearful relationship many people inherit from prohibition. He started smoking young, enjoyed cannabis before surfing, and later carried it into music. Over time, though, he also learned the value of taking breaks. After his son was born, Williams stopped consuming for about six months.

“Those times are really nice too,” he says. “The beautiful times of clarity and getting clearheaded for a little bit just adds to, I think, the human experience that is involved in cannabis.”

These days, he prefers live rosin. Pepper also has a cannabis line called Stoned Love, named after the band’s song “Stone Love.” The group partnered with Party Favors Dro on pre-rolls packaged in embossed tins featuring art tied to Pepper’s long visual history.

The artwork comes from a classmate who grew up with the band in Hawaii, which gives the packaging more personal weight than the average musician licensing deal. For Williams, cannabis still connects most strongly to surfing and music because each can pull him toward the present. He describes creativity as something received rather than forced.

Cannabis may clear a path toward that source, but Williams knows inspiration still needs discipline. He balances the mystical talk with a reminder from Pepper’s manager: Proper preparation prevents poor performance. Practice remains the bridge between the signal and the song.

Fatherhood Put Everything in Order

Williams now measures touring against a different center of gravity. At the time of the interview, he had a 2-year-old son and another child on the way. Fatherhood, he says, gave him a clearer reason for the work and a larger capacity for love.

“My heart is so much bigger now because I’m a father,” Williams says.

He became emotional while describing that shift. Before drummer, surfer, or touring musician, he now sees himself as a parent.

“That’s who I am first and foremost,” he says.

Pepper’s schedule has also changed. The band spent its 20s and 30s charging forward without much balance. Now, its members have children, families, and enough control over the operation to tour without letting the road swallow everything else. Williams still hates leaving for weeks at a time, but the arrangement allows him to be fully present when he returns.

“When I’m home, I’m home,” he says.

That idea loops back to Point Break. Presence sits at the center of nearly everything Williams values: catching a wave, locking into a song, smoking with intention, raising his children, or stepping onto a beach with friends he has known for decades. A good festival can become another way of entering that state.

For one weekend, the stage opened up. The crowd moved closer. The bands stopped behaving like separate businesses and started acting like the friends they are. Then Pepper turned Virginia Beach into a backyard.

<p>The post Yesod Williams Brought the Ohana to Point Break Festival first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Yesod Williams Brought the Ohana to Point Break Festival appeared first on Paradise Found.

Editor’s note: We originally published this interview with Oliver Tree in 2020, around the release of his debut album “Ugly Is Beautiful.” Oliver Tree Nickell passed away on June 14, 2026, at 32, one of six people killed when two helicopters collided over Rio de Janeiro. He was traveling on his World’s First World Tour. In the conversation below, which ran as he was breaking out, he talked about cannabis as the engine of his creative life, his years dealing and trimming flower in Santa Cruz and the persona he built to pull people toward his music. He called “Ugly Is Beautiful” his last album and said he was done as Oliver Tree. He wasn’t. He went on to release three more, including “Love You Madly Hate You Badly” this past April. We’re republishing the interview as we first ran it, in his own words, to remember him.

For Oliver Tree, having a hand in every aspect of his career is vital. He enjoys wearing the many hats required to maintain a successful career as a recording artist and budding filmmaker. When we connect by phone, he’s a week away from releasing his debut album, “Ugly is Beautiful,” a body of work that is introspective, reflective and intelligently fun. Behind the work is a creator who is not only extremely self-aware of his comedic persona and role as an entertainer, but a man who has built his career on entertaining himself first.

Before we dive in, I’d read that you made the music video for “Bury Me Alive” for six bucks. Is that true?

Oliver Tree: Truth is, I wasn’t even planning on shooting a video. I was actually shooting some promotional pieces for the album and had built prosthetics out of this play doh material. We’d spent a lot of time making them and thought they looked pretty crazy. We had the camera, the story cam gear, and were at a location that had incredible train tracks outside. I was like, “Fuck it, let’s just drop a camera on me and shoot a one-shot-take video,” and I just choreographed things as I went. It was purely spur of the moment and I just kept doing it until it became what you see in the final video.

The sirens at the end of the video – were those added or were they real?

Oliver Tree: There was no production, just me and my two friends filming illegally. It’s three in the morning and I’m just screaming the lyrics, trying to get what we needed as quickly as possible. Someone from the complex was yelling at me from inside the building and I’m pretty sure they called the cops because we ended up getting a pretty fat ticket. I guess the cost [of production] was a little more [than six dollars] if you consider the ticket, but that’s not really part of the budget because there was no budget.

Ultimately, you used what you had around you and crafted something pretty awesome.

Oliver Tree: That’s what quarantine teaches us to do. You have to get creative with what you have. [The experience] proved to me that with a good enough idea, you can execute a strong video. This video that cost me six dollars ended up being more successful than videos I’d spent one-hundred-grand on. And that’s the funny part. You can have all the money in the world, but that’s not going to make a better product sometimes.

I’m ultimately using [music videos] as opportunities as a director to make a scene from an action movie. I’m not really thinking about it like, “How do I make the best promotional piece for my album?” It’s more, “How do I make a crazy fucking scene from a movie that no one’s ever seen before?”

And it  just so happens there’s a music album behind the video.

Oliver Tree: Exactly. Truth is, I only signed a major label record deal so I could get the money to subsidize my vision as a filmmaker. I was signed to an indie label before and it didn’t end up working out. I wasn’t able to afford any of my visions. It was the kind of thing where signing with a major label was a necessity based on what I want to do as a visual artist. The beautiful thing is, I found a cheat code which allows me to use the key from one castle to open the door to another castle. Taking a piece of the music industry and using it to open doors in the film industry.

Is it accurate to say film has been your grand vision?

Oliver Tree: Neither [music nor film] are the main thing, but this is my last album. As Oliver Tree, I’m completely done. This project is over. It’s a fucking incredible album, I spent five years making it, and I don’t need to do anything else. It’s already the best it can be and I’m going to leave it at that. I’m planning to segue over to film now. I’ve been working on screenplays during this COVID period and I’ve been working on building out my own production company. I’m trying to do as much as I can to move myself out of the music industry and into film.

But how did you initially focus on music?

Oliver Tree: Let me first start by saying that my parents met in music class. They were both flute players, but the class got cancelled, so they would go up in the trees at school and play flute. That was the setup to me growing up in an incredibly musical household. 

Every type of instrument covered our walls. There was a piano to bang on. There were guitars. Everything. My parents forced me to play piano at the age of three and I fucking hated it. At the age of six, I was like, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” and stopped. They were like, “Okay, we’re glad you tried it, if you don’t like it, we respect that.” The next year, I’m seven and I go to this guitar shop – Starving Musician – in Santa Cruz where I grew up. I’m playing some of the guitars there and I find this mini Pignose guitar, which has a built-in amplifier that creates distortion within itself. It basically allowed me to play something that sounded like rock, which was my fucking dream. For some reason, distortion always spoke to me, and looking back now, I can see that’s the origin of me as a real rocker. I ended up saving every penny in my piggy bank and bought that fucking guitar, which was a pivotal turning point where I realized this was something I wanted. I wanted to play music for me.

Have you always been conscious to craft narratives within your work?

Oliver Tree: I’ve been filming stupid videos with my friends since I was a kid and I’ve been making music and songs the same way. The sole purpose was to entertain myself. Instead of playing video games, I was making videos and songs. It was just something I naturally gravitated toward, so I just continued to build my skill sets.

At a certain point, you start to have people reach out and offer job opportunities and things like that. In a lot of ways, you start to find that these paths choose you. I didn’t pick to be a musician. A record label reached out to me to sign me. Even though it didn’t go well, I couldn’t stop making music. Even if I wasn’t getting paid, I couldn’t stop making music. And that’s when you know that’s your role. You can’t help it. Eventually, I found the right support system to help me share my art and give positive messages to people to help them get through this fucked up world that we live in.

I am a storyteller first and foremost. I have stories to tell. Whatever means through which I tell those stories, whether it’s through music, film, performance art, through the way I present myself and conduct myself, through interviews and things like that – they’re all ways for me to tell my stories and ultimately set up a mirror in front of society to look at how ridiculous we are and how ridiculous things have become.

To that end, how did you end up crafting your look and persona?

Oliver Tree: It came out of necessity after failure. I’d spent ten-plus years making music and nobody gave a fuck. My first record career had failed and when I ran out of money, I started trimming weed to make a living. I was back to being a normal Joe, you know? Making as much art and crazy shit as I am now, just without any of the support or financing. My image was created to pull people to my music.

I started working with some of my other artist friends and ended up having this opportunity to shoot my first music video that would end up on MTV. It was my first chance of being seen by millions of people. I was like, “Okay. How am I going to separate myself on MTV? Am I going to try and look “hot” like everybody else and sell sex, or am I going to try and stick out like a sore thumb?” I basically pulled together all these parts of my life that were ridiculous, unique elements I thought were cool as a child and built an outfit around them. I went with the bowl cut, the jacket I took from my mom’s closet that my aunt gave her in the eighties, the pants that I always wanted, and sunglasses I would wear as a kid. It made me feel cool. All these things were authentic to myself and my life, but I turned it up a few notches.

Anyway, I showed up to the shoot as the feature on the song and everyone literally looked right through me. It was crazy. My friend from highschool couldn’t even recognize me. When he finally realized it was me he was like, “Bro, we gotta film some Vines.” This was my friend Getter, who was part of the “suh dude” movement with his roommate, Nick Colletti. He filmed these Vines of me in the outfit and they started getting millions of plays, so I started testing out all these different characters. Some of them were even more obnoxious and some were borderline offensive, so I had to learn what was appropriate and constantly reevaluate. I found that my current look specifically was the one that continuously would get millions of plays, even on my rinky-dink Vine account that only had twenty-thousand followers. I had found a look that had cut through the Internet. I had created a thumbnail that was clickbait. Even if he’s obnoxious and annoying, he’s still the most lovable of all these characters I’d made. The [current one] was the one that resonated the most on a cultural level.

So I said, “Fuck it. No one is listening to my music. This image can be a vehicle to pull people over to it and finally give them a chance to hear it.” It goes way beyond making art. Making art is the action of what you do as an artist, but promotion of art is probably eighty-percent of what you do. I just found a way to promote [my music] in a way that could make the promotion itself art. I was able to justify spending eighty-percent of my time promoting because the promotion was just as much art as the music itself. [The promotion] might not have had the same impact a song might have had, but it was a way to pull people to a song.

You discovered one hand could sort of feed the other in a way.

Oliver Tree: Ultimately, what I think I’m doing here is devising a blueprint that allows artists to do every single thing under the sun creatively as one project. The beauty of it is, I can wear one outfit, which allows me to be able be in a fucking random skit on a comedy video and be the same project and the same character in this world where I’m making super serious music that’s lightyears away from [the look]. Creatively speaking, I can do anything I want, and still have it fit under the banner of Oliver Tree.

What went into crafting your specific voice and style?

Oliver Tree: It’s taken almost twenty years to develop my vocal style. For people who think my voice sounds annoying right now, you should have heard it when I was recording at age seven. It’s one of the most awful sounds you can imagine. But that only proves that anyone can be a singer. Anyone with working vocal cords has the potential to be a voice for their generation. For the first five years I was making music, I couldn’t listen to myself. Five years. Can you imagine? I knew there was something unique and special about my voice, but [at the time] it sounded like shit. I kept refining it and refining it and learned how to find all of these different ranges. I was also able to discover these different characters that existed within myself, and I studied groups like Gorillaz – one of my biggest influences – who had all these different genres and voices. They’ve done a great job marrying different sounds together through genre fusion. Their early albums lay a blueprint for how you can mix all of these different styles and I just took that blueprint, expanded on it with modern techniques and applied it to my own stories.

If you look through my songs, sometimes it sounds like three different voices on there. When I was learning how to explore my voice and find other characters within myself, me and my piano player – Casey Mattson – would do these psychedelic sessions where we wouldn’t sleep for a week and would just stay up and make music nonstop. During this time, we’d drink pu erh tea and smoke an endless amount of joints. We’d put on different outfits and set up the lighting for different moods so that each time I went up on the mic, it would be a different experience. Sometimes I’d be channeling a forty-year-old emo man, or another time I’d be channeling a twelve-year-old girl. That was the way I learned to pull some of these voices out of myself and into the music. It’s about channeling. I don’t try to mimic based on things I hear, I channel a character and let them do the singing for me.

Ninety-percent of the music I write is improvised. It’s not actually written. I just go into the booth, improvise, and let the music write itself. I’m at a place now where I’ve found sixteen voices and characters within me. It’s a jazz approach that allows you to capture a moment instead of trying to create a moment. Every lyric, every single melody you hear from my voice is entirely by me. I don’t let anyone else get involved in that because I want it to be the one thing that’s pure about Oliver Tree. Otherwise, you start having all these other people’s stories being told. There’s only one feature on “Ugly is Beautiful,” and that’s Little Ricky ZR3. This guy is the fucking future and is my favorite artist. For some reason, his music really connects with me and I think he’s going to be the biggest artist on the planet in a few years.

Ultimately you have to tell a story that’s authentic and true. It helps to pull from your own experience, and after I’ve established enough of an idea that’s worth singing on, I go into the booth and just let it rip.

Does weed play a role in your creative process?

Oliver Tree: Weed is a huge part of my existence. It’s like my coffee. I don’t drink coffee but I smoke weed from when I start my day until when I go to sleep. I’m not advocating that lifestyle, but for me, because of my body chemistry, weed has the effect of a stimulant. It doesn’t make me sleepy, it actually makes it harder for my brain to shut off. But that’s a really nice advantage when you’re making art all day and need to have something to help you persevere. In some ways, weed has helped me reach my potential creatively. If I have these moments when I’m feeling low energy, smoking boosts me back up to keep creating. So for me, smoking weed is every step of the process. I’m smoking weed while I’m writing the music. I’m smoking weed while I’m recording the music. I smoke weed while I’m mixing the music and I smoke weed during the entire mastering process.

Weed helps me chill during chaos. When you’re traveling the world, never having stability, constantly staying up and functioning on only three hours of sleep, weed is something that can help you have those moments of down time during your day to breathe and just chill the fuck out so you can go back into the chaos with a level-headed mindset.

By the way, did you say earlier you used to trim weed?

Oliver Tree: Yeah, that was how I was able to stay alive financially. My good homie and bass player at the time let me trim for him. I ended up doing that to keep afloat while my recording career failed. But I’ve had huge connections to cannabis my entire life.

Growing up in Santa Cruz, I’d steal weed from my parents, and all through high school I was a really good weed dealer. My mom knew I sold, but I explained it to her this way: I said, “Mom, don’t think of me as a weed dealer, think of me as an entrepreneur.”

At a certain point, I was the only weed dealer at school. It was crazy. I would sell weed in the bathrooms, handing nugs beneath one stall to the other stall. One time, I slid the weed under a stall and the kid was just sitting on the toilet and didn’t take it. I was like, “Does it not look good to you? Is it not enough? What’s up?” Whoever it was, didn’t respond. I heard them leave the stall and then another person came in and they grabbed the weed. I realized I’d slid weed over to some random kid taking a shit.

[Dealing] was a big part of me learning how to run a business. Having a business background became extremely beneficial later on when it came to building companies, starting touring entities, starting recording and publishing companies, production companies – all which utilized skills I learned from my early days as a weed dealer in Santa Cruz.

It sounds like all of your experiences – both in art and business – happened  very organically.

Oliver Tree: It’s cool to be able to understand that the number one pitfall in both music and art is commerce. But the bigger pitfall is that artists are never really taught about business in art. I went to CalArts School for two years and they didn’t teach me a single business class. There wasn’t even one available. That’s fucking insane. People are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to a school that doesn’t even teach them the idea of business, when it’s business that allows you to survive as an artist. To not teach artists about commerce-in-art is extremely detrimental, not only to an artist’s survival, but to the execution of their creative endeavors. Making art on a commercial scale costs a lot of money, so earning how to find – and work with – investors and patrons plays a massive part in that process.

And it succeeds for you – in large part I imagine – because of the dichotomy between your more comical persona and the more serious subject matter of your content.

Oliver Tree: I never try to make the music funny. Paired with my character, it shows you the duality of people. It shows you to never judge a book by its cover. What you see on the outside isn’t usually the vulnerable person within. On a surface level, my album “Ugly is Beautiful” is about teaching people not to judge a book by its cover and to learn how to love themselves and the imperfections within themselves. By me presenting myself the way I do, I can show that message through my actions instead of by preaching to people. I can show people that you can be loved by being who you are and looking the way you look. But the album also goes much deeper, teaching how to accept who you are as a person and accepting where you’re at in life.

There’s so much hatred in this world because people hate themselves and hate their lives. They can’t look at themselves in the mirror, need to have something going on at all times, or constantly need other people around them. People are so sick with hatred that it manifests externally, which is why we’re living in such a fucked up society.

I’ve learned to love myself and how to accept who I am. I’ve learned my flaws are what made the DNA of the character of who I am today. “Ugly is Beautiful” is about coming to a place within yourself where you have finally arrived.

Follow @Olivertree and check out his debut album “Ugly is Beautiful” available everywhere

<p>The post Oliver Tree Deals Art: Remembering The Late Singer Through His 2020 High Times Interview first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Oliver Tree Deals Art: Remembering The Late Singer Through His 2020 High Times Interview appeared first on Paradise Found.

In the early ’90s, the SoCal trio of Bradley Nowell, Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh pioneered a mashup of ska, punk, reggae and hip-hop that took the airwaves and stoner culture by storm, before tragedy struck. Now, 30 years later, Brad’s son Jakob Nowell adds closure and a compelling new chapter to the band’s storied legacy.

Everyone has a Sublime story.

Hearing their music for the first time might have accompanied the loss of your virginity, smoking your first joint or some combination of the two.

You might have been high in a friend’s car, drunk at a house party or, if you were lucky enough to catch one, experiencing their fervor at a live show. Whatever your introduction to Sublime, it came to define your relationship with the band and the story you would share.

For many, their Sublime inauguration came in 1996, hearing Bradley Nowell’s voice crescendo across the radio singing “What I Got,” the global smash hit Rolling Stone placed at number 83 on its 2008 list of “100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time.”

If future Sublime songs could have also made the cut, we’ll never know: the guitar-strumming fingers and rapturous vocals of Nowell were lost to the physical world a month prior to “What I Got” being released. It seemed Sublime was over before it had begun, catching fire only to be without its driving creative force.

Yet, somehow, the music not only endured. It thrived.

“What I Got” became the summer anthem of 1996, blasting through headphones and speakers across the globe. As the band posthumously grew in popularity, fans from all over the world began to both celebrate and mourn the music: appreciation for its existence, disappointment for never being able to see it performed live again.

Our minds became vehicles for connecting with Sublime. We could picture Nowell lighting up that morning cigarette, stepping into a new day’s sneakers, playing the guitar with calloused hands like a mother fucking riot, the energy of the song’s composition penetrating beyond our sound systems and into our souls, where the Long Beach rebel was still alive.

Now, 30 years later, with over 20 million records sold worldwide, Sublime has been revived with original members Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh, joined by Bradley’s son, Jakob Nowell, in the role once held by his father.

It’s a synergistic, synchronous, full-circle moment: the baby featured in the “What I Got” music video now stationed as the band’s frontman, carrying the torch and resurrecting our connection to Sublime so we no longer need to imagine “what if.”

With a new tour and new music on the horizon, maybe, just maybe, the greatest Sublime story is the one that hasn’t yet been told.

Forged in the Garages of Long Beach

Visit any university in the United States, and at least one student possesses a poster, shirt or other memorabilia featuring Sublime’s iconic sun symbol, a visual representation of the band akin to The Rolling Stones’ tongue and the Grateful Dead’s skull. The imagery has withstood time in the same way Sublime’s music continues to inspire generations of fans old and new.

Forged in the garages and backyard parties of Long Beach, California, lead singer Bradley Nowell, bassist Eric Wilson and drummer Bud Gaugh emerged as SoCal’s preeminent leader in the Cali-reggae-dub movement, bringing with it a following of friends and fans who also happened to be cannabis enthusiasts.

Since the band’s inception, cannabis culture has played a pivotal role as both relatable subject matter within Sublime’s music and an aid to their creative process.

“I’d been smoking since I was 12 or 13 years old, and when Brad turned me onto reggae music, it was like, ‘Oh, these two things go together hand in hand,’” Gaugh said during a recent interview. “It opens you to your spirituality and puts your mind onto an astral plane where you can be more focused on the divinity you’re encountering. The beats, the rhythm, it all went together trancelike. The rhythm would push your buzz and your buzz would compliment the rhythm. It was all intertwined.”

So intertwined at times, the band would roll up to gigs and find the majority of their audience was already stoned.

“We were smoking outside, we were smoking inside, it was just what we did,” Gaugh said. “There was nothing shameful about it as far as we were concerned.”

Weed was a great unifier between Gaugh and Wilson, who had birthed their creative alchemy in different projects prior to Sublime, but never felt completely in flow until meeting Nowell.

“The writing and creative process in those other bands was slow and painful,” Gaugh said. “It was forced. We really had to struggle to write something we liked, but after meeting Brad and playing in his garage the first week, we had five or six songs. It was effortless. With Brad, we had melodies and rhythms you could dance to.”

Sublime’s first official lineup of Nowell, Wilson and Gaugh debuted at a Fourth of July party on the peninsula, a seemingly innocuous show that, according to Gaugh, turned into a riot.

“The party wasn’t just high school kids and friends, adults were present, citizens from our neighborhood, all bouncing their heads to our music,” Gaugh said. “We received instant approval that our unit had groove, and we knew right away we had something strong there.”

Three friends, each playing their part: Gaugh hammering on the kit, Wilson holding down the bass line, and Nowell commanding both the guitar and the microphone with such intensity the entire crowd was afoot, standing and moving to the rhythm, a byproduct of three musicians tapped into their inner divinities, outwardly transmuting a positive vibration birthed in chaos.

The show proved Nowell, Wilson and Gaugh could not only be an effective band together, but that their music resonated on a deeper level with the audience, something Gaugh and Wilson’s other outfits hadn’t accomplished. Sublime was music you could feel.

“Trying to gig with other friends’ bands, we were always welcomed because those bands knew they were better than us,” Gaugh said. “But when we started playing parties as Sublime, those other bands weren’t too happy to re-invite us.”

Five Bands, Five Kegs, Five Bucks

Building on their growing local momentum, Sublime ventured beyond Long Beach to gig at warehouse and college parties, eventually testing the waters of greater Los Angeles.

“There weren’t a lot of clubs letting punk rock bands play back then, so you would get these ‘five bands/five kegs/five bucks’ deals,” Gaugh said. “Promoters could easily put us with a rock band, hippie band or funk/punk band like Fishbone because we filled all those spaces, one of the driving factors behind people’s enthusiasm to see us. We were playing different types of music beyond just one style.”

Pulling from a multitude of creative influences afforded Sublime a diverse range of audience exposure, creating an influx of fandom from a variety of pockets that were traditionally more siloed.

“We made friends with No Doubt early on because we found their fans were also our fans,” Gaugh said. “They were in Orange County and we were in LA County. When we’d gig in Los Angeles, they would support us, and when they’d gig in Fullerton or Costa Mesa, we’d support them.”

The group then sought out bands who were similar in style to organically grow their reach in other locations.

“We’d be playing a fraternity party at the Colorado River and the other band would be like, ‘Oh, this guy over here from Alpha Beta Kappa G-String is their treasurer,’” Gaugh said. “We’d go talk to that guy and steal the information, which is how we learned to gig for ourselves.”

When not immersed in their hard-partying lifestyle, Gaugh and his bandmates flipped through Maximum Rocknroll’s “Book Your Own Fucking Life,” the popular fanzine of the times that listed promoters’ and club owners’ information for bands to book their own shows.

“Miguel [Michael Happoldt, Sublime’s OG mixing engineer and producer] would get on the phone: ‘Hey this is Miguel with Skunk Records, I’ve got Skunk recording artist Sublime coming through your town on these dates and wanted to see if we could hop on a gig there,’” Gaugh said. “We weren’t getting any love until we came up with the Skunk Records imprint. That was the defining factor. It became, ‘Oh Skunk Records? I’ve heard of you guys.’ They had no fucking idea who we were but they didn’t want to sound like assholes.”

The gigs started to roll in for Sublime, and they began to grow their fanbase up and down the West Coast. No longer was it a question if their music resonated with audiences. Now, the mission was to expand their reach and land coveted radio play.

The Sticker on Randy’s BMW

After self-releasing their debut album “40oz to Freedom” in 1992, Sublime embarked on a self-generated tour that began to birth interest from independent labels.

“We were talking with Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion/Epitaph Records and he gave us some recording time at his studio,” Gaugh said. “We go to Hollywood, we record with Donnell Cameron, but Gurewitz isn’t there. We’re told he flew to New York to sign a contract for Bad Religion with Atlantic but would be back in a week and would call us. Donnell goes to pick up some food for us, and while he’s away, Miguel rewinds the two-inch tape, puts it in the box, and we split.”

Cameron returned to an empty studio with more than enough food for one person, and a small note from the band to have Gurewitz call them when he was back.

But Sublime didn’t see eye to eye creatively nor contractually with Epitaph, and declined to move forward. Having already recorded their material, the band figured they only owed for the studio time and parted ways.

“It was our intellectual property,” Gaugh said. “We were like, ‘This is our music and we’re gonna go,’ which is when we put out ‘Robbin’ the Hood.’ We had half an album finished with eight or nine songs that technically could have been a Hollywood album, but we liked to use all the space on the CD.”

Sublime finished recording “Robbin’ the Hood,” their second studio album, in various living rooms and flop houses across Orange County and Long Beach, but still needed distribution to help maximize its reach.

Fortunately, the band’s previous grassroots touring and independently released records generated enough exposure that they caught the attention of Jon Phillips, a young A&R at Gasoline Alley, an affiliate of Universal MCA.

“I was introduced to Sublime in 1993 through ‘Groovy’ Greg Abramson, an intern at Gasoline Alley,” said Jon Phillips, founder of Silverback Management and Sublime’s former manager. “I’d gotten an entry-level job there right out of school and Greg and I were the same age and had the same cultural identities.”

It was Abramson who handed Phillips the cassette tapes to “Jah Won’t Pay the Bills” and “40oz to Freedom,” instantly igniting his fascination with Sublime.

“Greg invited me to meet the guys and watch them play at Cal State Long Beach,” Phillips said. “I proceeded to identify Sublime as the only band I wanted to sign in the music business. In the two years since I’d received those cassettes, and subsequently ‘Robbin’ The Hood,’ I don’t think there was anything else I wanted to listen to. That’s how infectious Sublime’s songs were, music that fused all these different cultural hues, samples and references.”

In late 1993, Phillips brought the band to the Gasoline Alley offices for what was supposed to be an initial A&R meeting.

“The guys came in hammered with Brad’s dog Lou Dog and cases of beer,” Phillips said. “It scared people. I think Brad thought they were just going to roll in, sign the record deal, and get paid instantly. But the band never really got to meet the brass and sort of got blown off.”

Despite Phillips telling his uncle, Randy Phillips, a partner at Gasoline Alley, that Sublime was the band they needed to sign, he was met with resistance.

“We meet with Randy and he does not think we’re too cute,” Gaugh said. “But we’re Sublime, we’re Bud, Brad, and Eric, and we are who we are. We don’t care if you’re mister fucking Geffen himself, we’re gonna be ourselves. You get the real deal. So we show up stoned, and halfway through the meeting, we step out to smoke a ‘cigarette,’ which Randy did not find professional at all. He basically told us to kick rocks.”

But Phillips was determined to bag Sublime another meeting.

“I came down later that night after the band left and was walking by the executives’ cars with the placards at their parking spaces,” Phillips said. “The cars were all lined up and Randy was driving this new BMW 2-seat convertible European edition.”

“On the way out, we slapped a Sublime sticker on Randy’s brand new BMW that still had its Santa Monica dealer plates,” Gaugh said. “He didn’t think that was too cute either and raged at Jon, almost firing him over it.”

“The label told me they weren’t doing any business with these guys and told the band’s lawyer at the time they weren’t doing any business with these guys. Then the lawyer called me and said he wasn’t doing any business with these guys.”

Phillips called Nowell and broke the news directly, to which Nowell said they were going to write “fuck Gasoline Alley” in the album liner notes. But Phillips was 23 years old and convinced of Sublime’s potential, so he went on a crusade, armed with Sublime’s cassette tapes, CDs, and other underground DIY output.

“I started sending Sublime to every A&R I could contact,” Phillips said. “There was a deal looming at Atlantic Records from another young scout, but they also slept on Sublime. Sublime’s music wasn’t a sure thing for a 50 or 60 year old suit in Beverly Hills and neither were their habits. Years later I asked Brett Gurewitz, ‘You had Sublime in the studio, why didn’t you sign them?’ He was like, ‘They were making music Epitaph didn’t fully identify with, and they had this girl in there doing this ska thing.’”

The girl was Gwen Stefani.

Sublime proceeded to self-release “Robbin’ The Hood” on Skunk Records, but in June 1994, Phillips brokered a reconciliation with Gasoline Alley, netting Sublime their first major record deal.

“When Sublime returned to the office to sign, Brad actually removed a folded Atlantic Records contract from his pocket and joked he was about to sign with another label,” Phillips said. “I’d become close with the guys, dedicated to their mission, and definitely would have been totally defeated if they’d signed elsewhere.”

“We came back to Gasoline Alley with, ‘We thought you’d dig it, just joking, sorry Mr. Randy,’” Gaugh said. “And then we signed a shitty deal.”

According to Phillips, the “shitty deal,” an entry-level Universal Records agreement for which they received $120,000 and was later renegotiated after the band’s success, also included an actual coin flip for their publishing: $100,000 for heads, $75,000 for tails. Nowell flipped heads and planned on using the contract money to buy their own recording equipment and rent a house in North County, San Diego, to make the next Sublime album.

“There are a lot of different layers to that story, but sometimes in the music business, you learn lessons the hard way,” Phillips said. “If you have success, you get some leverage to renegotiate, and if you don’t, labels usually cut their losses and move on. In this case, given all the circumstances, Sublime received an entry-level, boilerplate deal. I actually gave them the advice to lawyer up because I saw what was going on as a young kid. It wasn’t inherent to Sublime, it was any young artist in the music business. They try to own you.”

“Date Rape,” Addiction, and the Edge of Stardom

But as the band laid plans for their future, Nowell spiraled deeper into addiction.

“Brad got slapped with a felony drug charge and wouldn’t be able to travel internationally,” Phillips said. “Gasoline Alley, before Sublime hit any popularity, I’ll give them credit for this, stepped up and threw down $40,000 to $50,000 for lawyers and drug treatment programs to get Brad a drug diversion that allowed him to tour.”

With Nowell on the mend, Phillips focused on maintaining Sublime’s ethos as independent artists, advising the label to allow Sublime to continue marketing the band’s preexisting albums (“40 Oz. To Freedom” and “Robbin’ The Hood”) on independent Skunk Records.

“I wanted the band to build organically and avoid the pitfalls of a major label association,” Phillips said. “By convincing the suits to give us permission to continue marketing the band through Skunk Records, Sublime sold close to a couple hundred-thousand hard copy CDs through independent distribution.”

The vision helped the discovery process, with the popular single from the “40oz” album, “Date Rape,” breaking on KROQ in 1995, roughly six months after Phillips signed Sublime in the summer of 1994.

“When the song ‘Date Rape’ came out, the subject matter was popular in the media,” Gaugh said. “It was national news. People were getting roofied at college parties so it was a common topic on campuses. Brad writes this funny song making light of the situation and how the guy gets it in the end and justice was served. It’s not a ‘pro-date rape’ song.”

In fact, “Date Rape” was first written by Nowell in 1992, three years before it ever received radio attention. According to Phillips, Nowell told him he was jacked on coffee one college morning at UC Santa Cruz and wrote the song without thinking too deeply about it.

But the thought of making a song titled “Date Rape” in 2026 seems unfathomable, regardless if the intent of the song was to shine light on a serious subject through humor. Yet that’s what made Sublime Sublime. Their music reflected the world and times around them, and the band was unafraid to confront the morally reprehensible aspects of society.

Nowell started refusing to play the song live, with Phillips having to sign papers that guaranteed the band would play “Date Rape” at the 3rd Annual KROQ Weenie Roast in June 1995, a now legendary set at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater that saw Stefani join Nowell for their hit “Saw Red” and 40 friends of the band join the stage with fake backstage passes they’d printed in advance.

“Sublime had a penchant, like everyone else, for freedom, and in their case, perhaps anarchy,” Phillips said. “All of that was so much a part of their DNA and the culture around them. It was authentic and they lived it.”

The band wore their association with counterculture on their sleeve, at times failing to show up to their own gigs, further perpetuating their notoriety as purveyors of drugs and mayhem.

But despite their reputation as wild cards, Sublime’s music continued to garner a cult following.

“There was something so unique but also universal about the music,” Phillips reminisced. “The cross section of all the touchpoints Sublime encompassed, hip-hop, reggae, punk rock, pop culture, sampling, even a small ode to the Grateful Dead, they fused together all these music subcultures to create something fresh and new.”

Music You Could Feel

Something fresh and new people could relate to because it was authentic, it was organic, and it resonated.

“We wrote about real things in our lives,” Gaugh said. “Brad had a very charismatic way about writing firsthand. Things that were in our songs like, ‘pissed in someone’s drink and threw a bike in the pool,’ that happened. With all this bullshit going on around us, there was still something lovable about life, and it was about trying to find the ‘good’ even when there were wicked things around.”

It’s why a teenager today can pick up any Sublime record and still have a connection to it, over 30 years later. But perhaps the group’s greatest resonance is the spiritual understanding that they were co-creating music with the universe: Bud, Brad and Eric, a clear channel on the astral plane, a trio communicating truths.

“With Sublime, it was the first time I experienced out-of-body realism,” Gaugh said. “When I was stoned and we were playing, I was floating around the room. A weird, ethereal, metaphysical kind of happening.”

Beyond the shared commonality between Sublime and its audiences around cannabis, weed also provided the basis for creative alchemy between Gaugh, Wilson and Nowell in such a way that their confluence of synergistic output was shared, felt and experienced by the crowd in the same way one might experience Mick and Keith or Flea and Frusciante communicating through their instruments.

“There’s a quote from Brad on one of the promotional CDs, ‘Good music is good music, and that should be enough for anybody,’” Phillips said. “Timeless music is timeless music and that’s the beauty and magic of it. That’s what makes it powerful. One Sublime song could traverse four different styles, not including the full repertoire, which might traverse 10 different forms. They’re so much more intellectual than people give them credit for and there was a lot of wisdom behind where a lot of these things came from that wasn’t by accident.”

The wisdom came from alignment, including Sublime’s connection to the legalization movement. The band’s last performance in Los Angeles was a 1996 benefit show at House of Blues on the Sunset Strip, cosponsored by NORML and High Times Magazine.

The Baby From the “What I Got” Video Takes the Mic

But now, over 30 years later, cannabis is legal and Sublime has returned to the stage under its original moniker, this time with Brad’s son Jakob Nowell installed as the new lead singer. It’s a role many never saw coming, but one the younger Nowell seemed destined for, with their new album “Until The Sun Explodes” due out June 12th, 2026.

Jakob Nowell only knew his father for 11 months, but as fate would have it, came of age and began carving his own path in the music industry, learning more about Bradley Nowell through the body of work he left behind.

Now, the younger Nowell holds the same guitar frets as his father, singing Bradley Nowell’s words, playing the same chords that became his birthright but delivering a sound and feeling uniquely his own.

If we all come from the same source, Bradley Nowell has certainly returned to that place, and now, while channeling from source, Jakob Nowell is undoubtedly bringing forth the essence and mysticism contained within his father’s energy. Jakob Nowell is not a carbon copy of his father, but if you look under the microscope, you’ll see within the double helixes of his DNA that love is also what he’s got.

“When Eric approached me to do a show for H.R. [Paul Hudson of Bad Brains] with Jakob, I was into it but skeptical,” Gaugh said. “I’d played a couple songs with Jakob maybe seven years prior and he was into a different style of music. I thought, ‘Is this going to work?’ But when we got into the studio together, it was like stepping back in time.”

The same “floating around the room feeling” Gaugh once felt with Wilson and Nowell’s father is the same feeling he’s now experiencing with Wilson and the younger Nowell.

“We’re playing in the studio and came out for a break,” Gaugh said. “Jake’s like, ‘Dude, that was so deep, I was floating around the room! Does that happen for you guys?’ Eric turns and looks at him like, ‘Yeah, man. If you do it right.’”

For a band largely without a lead singer for the past three decades, Sublime has encountered new life, a trippy, fortuitous, full-circle experience cracking open the door to the vista of what the original lineup could have looked like to this day. In many ways, the authenticity of Jakob Nowell as Sublime’s new frontman is emblematic of that panoramic landscape.

“Early on when I was working with Jakob, he was totally focused on wanting to create his own identity and vision and not really touch the Sublime legacy,” Phillips said. “But when you’re blood to that, it’s in your soul that you would one day want to embrace and be a part of it. The fact that he has the talent to do it and carry it the way he does is remarkable to me.”

A new generation of music and fans, built upon older pillars, cut from the same stone.

“30 years later, we’re still being played on the radio,” Gaugh said. “It’s an incredible feeling. Our fans are the greatest people in the world. Hats off to them because this is truly a testament to their love of the music and why it’s still here. Getting the opportunity to go out and perform this music with Brad’s son is incredibly humbling. I’m just so grateful to be able to do this. It’s a dream come true. We got short changed, we were never able to play some of these songs. ‘Ensenada’ has topped the charts for seven or eight weeks in a row in the US and it’s still on the charts in Canada.”

Sublime’s current airwave success is due in part to the creative input employed by Gaugh, Wilson and the younger Nowell, methodology eerily similar to the way the Sublime elders created songs with Nowell’s father over 30 years before.

“It’s like how we wrote Sublime back in the day,” Gaugh said. “Brad would come with a melody or an idea and he would sit there and play. Then Eric would start playing or I would come up with a rhythm. It was the three of us creating on the spot. Now, Jakob might have a chord progression already done and a hook, but he might not have all the lyrics, which is exactly how we used to do it.”

Gaugh even sees the younger Nowell employ the same formula his father used when crafting songs, writing about what’s happening around him and even writing about the things he’s experiencing while on tour with Sublime, a key component of his dad’s technique.

It’s part of the reason Sublime’s 1990s discography has remained relevant up until today, where the inputs to the songs transcended the moment in time and spoke to the underlying feelings of the times.

And feelings are timeless.

Perhaps there’s a feeling of comfort between Gaugh and Wilson with the younger Nowell in the fold, a trippy recreation of something alchemically familiar and an opportunity to musically expand a previous endpoint into a new beginning.

“The fact there could be a presentation rooted in the actual kin to Bradley, I just love the generational aspect of music,” Phillips said. “I work with Bob Marley’s son Stephen Marley and Aaron Neville’s son Ivan Neville. Whether it’s blood like the Neville Brothers or the Marleys or Sublime, Bradley to Jakob, it only gets the message of the music further out there to affect more people that need to hear it. We didn’t get to see the real Sublime with Brad Nowell enough, and for that reason, it’s a blessing it gets to continue.”

Continue and thrive with both a new generation of fans and those who have been with the band since its inception.

“For the OG fans, Jakob in the band is closure,” Gaugh said. “It’s some kind of relief for them. Everybody has wanted this for years from a fanbase standpoint, so being able to give them that is awesome. But also, for the longevity of the band. I’m a dad now, and the things my kids do and say, I’m an old man. Trying to stay hip is harder as you age, but Jake’s in it and he keeps us relevant.”

A new frontman from the same seed is able to give us something similar but different, weaving an unexpected, unknown tapestry right before our eyes, one we could never have imagined but now get to experience.

“I was talking with a family at Mission Bay Fest and they were like, ‘My dad played your music and I grew up loving Sublime. Now my kids are listening to Sublime,’” Gaugh said. “With our new music coming out, it almost sounds like we started where we left off.”

It’s as if time stood still and now, 30 years later, we’ve resumed a parallel reality where a Nowell is atop the microphone, a Wilson on bass, a Gaugh on drums and the “What I Got” summer anthem of 1996 is morphing into “Ensenada” as the 2026 anthem of the summer.

After a long hibernation, the sky finally opened and Bradley Nowell reached down, placing his guitar into the waiting hands of his son, Jakob, familiar fingers and a familiar voice that now strum fresh perspectives and breathe new life into the Sublime catalogue.

Now it’s Jakob, backed by Bud and Eric, who lights his morning cigarette, slips into his sneakers, and plays his guitar like a mother fucking riot, honoring the legacy of Sublime and inviting the next generation of fans to come along the journey on the road to something new, helping tell a story that hasn’t yet been told.

<p>The post The Baby From Sublime’s ‘What I Got’ Video Is Now the Band’s Frontman. He’s Bradley Nowell’s Son. first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post The Baby From Sublime’s ‘What I Got’ Video Is Now the Band’s Frontman. He’s Bradley Nowell’s Son. appeared first on Paradise Found.

When most people think about major hip-hop festivals, Montana rarely enters the conversation. For decades, many national tours bypassed the state entirely, leaving local fans to travel hundreds of miles to catch major artists.

That reality helped inspire Rappin’ The Rivers, an independent festival founded in 2023 by Montana rap duo Filth and Foul, made up of Nickel Barney (NICKBUSY) and Shane Boylan (Contact). What started as an effort to bring large-scale hip-hop programming to their home state has grown into one of Montana’s most recognizable music gatherings.

Now entering its fourth year, the festival returns to Cardwell, Montana, on August 7–8, 2026.

A Montana Festival With Its Own Identity

Held at the same venue that has hosted events including Rockin’ The Rivers and Country Jam, Rappin’ The Rivers has built its reputation around a blend of live music, camping, nightlife, and Montana scenery.

Unlike many urban music festivals, the event takes place against a backdrop of mountains, open skies, and sprawling campgrounds. Every weekend pass includes camping access, helping create an experience that extends beyond the performances themselves.

Festival organizers say that combination has helped attract a growing audience from both inside and outside Montana. The event has also earned recognition in the Bozeman’s Choice Awards, where it has been named Best Festival for three consecutive years.

Hip-Hop, EDM, and More

This year’s lineup includes artists from across hip-hop, EDM, rock, and adjacent genres. Scheduled performers include DaBaby, That Mexican OT, Paul Wall, Dave East, Kid Ink, Rittz, X-Raided, Whitney Peyton, Unconventional Kingz, Champagne Drip, DirtySnatcha, Hairitage, LadyDice, and Doggface.

One of the festival’s signature attractions is Ravin’ The Rivers, an EDM-focused stage that operates alongside the event’s hip-hop programming. Organizers are also introducing a new Rockin’ The Rivers stage in 2026, expanding the festival’s musical footprint with additional rock and mixed-genre performances.

Another notable addition is Young Dirty Bastard, son of Wu-Tang Clan member Ol’ Dirty Bastard. He joins the festival as both a performer and special guest host through a new partnership involving the Dirty Jones brand.

Cannabis Culture Meets Independent Music

As the festival continues to grow, organizers have also added partnerships that reflect its connection to broader counterculture communities.

Among them is Evan Kajander, owner of Montana-based cannabis company Apogee Gardens, who has joined the event as a partner for 2026. While Rappin’ The Rivers remains primarily a music festival, the addition reflects the long-standing overlap between independent hip-hop, festival culture, and cannabis communities.

The festival grounds also feature vendors, merchandise, VIP experiences, food options, art installations, and after-hours activities that help create a weekend-long destination rather than a traditional concert experience.

Building Something Different

What makes Rappin’ The Rivers notable is not simply the lineup. It is the fact that an event built by independent Montana artists has managed to carve out its own place in a crowded festival landscape.

In a state often overlooked by major touring circuits, the festival has become a gathering point for fans of hip-hop, bass music, camping culture, and independent creative communities. As it enters its fourth year, Rappin’ The Rivers continues to grow while maintaining the Montana identity that helped set it apart in the first place.

Rappin’ The Rivers returns to Cardwell, Montana, on August 7–8, 2026. Get tickets here.

All images courtesy of Rappin The Rivers team.

<p>The post Rappin’ The Rivers Is Building Montana’s Hip-Hop Outpost first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Rappin’ The Rivers Is Building Montana’s Hip-Hop Outpost appeared first on Paradise Found.

In the music video for “Ram Pam Pam,” Venezuelan artist Micro TDH put older women smoking weed front and center. Asked about it, he doesn’t push a position. He describes one: “It’s part of my day-to-day. I’m just reflecting my lifestyle.”

Fernando Daniel Morillo Rivas, known as Micro TDH, is one of the more interesting artists to come out of Venezuela’s urban scene in the last decade. He’s from Mérida. He started doing freestyle in the street with no label, no investors and no plan beyond the next bar. He’s now collaborated with Yandel, Pablo Alborán, Piso 21, Lenny Tavárez, Myke Towers and Rels B. His 2020 single “Cafuné” passed a million streams without a real industry push behind it.

In October 2025 he dropped Segundo Acto, an album with eight interconnected music videos that play as a single story. He’s now touring it across Latin America, the U.S. and Spain.

And weed is part of the picture. Not as a brand. Not as a stunt. Just as it is.

‘Ram Pam Pam’ and what older women smoking means

The image is unusual for the genre. Cannabis in urban music videos usually skews young and party-coded. Here, the women smoking are older. They’re at home. The visual is calm.

Asked about that visual choice, Micro TDH doesn’t push a position. He describes one.

“I don’t want to push cannabis use on anyone. But it’s part of my day-to-day. So what I’m doing is reflecting my own lifestyle.”

Micro TDH

He has thoughts about the plant, he says. Some positive. Some negative. He’s not declaring it a virtue and he’s not condemning it. He’s showing it the way it shows up in his own life.

A second act, and the rules he learned without a label

The album is called Segundo Acto. Second Act. And he means it literally, in the screenwriting sense.

“The second act is where the hero has to remember who he is, reformulate his identity and let go of false beliefs to keep going.”

Micro TDH

That’s not the kind of answer most artists give when asked about a tour. He’s framing his life as a story he’s still inside. The conversation around the record is about identity, not the merch table.

The route here was unusual. “Cafuné” broke without a major behind it. The lesson he took from that is the same one he repeats now, years later.

“What connects with people the most is what’s real. The genuine. What comes from the heart. You can feel it when something is authentic.”

Micro TDH

He won’t put it in marketing terms. He puts it in craft terms: whatever you make, the substance of it has to be honest. Otherwise it doesn’t travel.

Rap, then everything else

Micro TDH’s catalog is hard to categorize. Rap. Trap. R&B. Reggae. Dembow. Ballads. Segundo Acto adds a first hardcore rock track, “Mi Primer Rock.” It also has the R&B introspection of “Ángeles,” the lightness of “Wendi” and “Duraznos,” and the deeper introspection of “Tu Reflexo.”

Asked where he feels most himself, he doesn’t dodge. “Probably rap. Because that’s where everything started.” But he likes being challenged. He likes leaving the comfort zone. And he leaves the door open: at some point, he says, he’d like to marry one musical line again.

Lost Soulz: the acting detour that wasn’t a detour

Micro TDH acted in Lost Soulz, an American independent film. He treats the experience as connected to the music, not separate from it.

“Music is one art. Acting is another. And acting is like music’s older brother.”

Micro TDH

He says acting forced him to embody a character, to feel what that character feels. It also taught him respect for performing arts in general. Which fits, given that he talks about his life like a screenwriter.

The cats

In the video for “Quizás” there’s a cat. Not random. He’s had cats his whole life.

“Pets aren’t just pets. They’re family. I think anyone with a pet at home has a happier and calmer heart.”

Micro TDH

Honest about the music, honest about the plant

The throughline in the interview isn’t cannabis. It’s honesty. “Cafuné” worked because the feeling was real. Segundo Acto works because the identity questions are real. The acting in Lost Soulz connects because it asked him to inhabit someone, not perform.

Cannabis fits the same pattern. He didn’t make it the campaign. He didn’t make it the controversy. He put it in the frame because it’s there, and he answered the question the same way: not selling, not condemning, describing.

Micro TDH is at the start of his second act. He’s choosing what to show. He’s choosing what to keep.

<p>The post Meet Micro TDH, the Venezuelan Artist Putting Older Women Smoking Weed in His Music Videos first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post Meet Micro TDH, the Venezuelan Artist Putting Older Women Smoking Weed in His Music Videos appeared first on Paradise Found.