The Band: Crazy Town
The Hit: “Butterfly”
The best thing to come out of Crazy Town’s “Butterfly” is a scene in the movie Orange County.
In the 2002 comedy, the main character is attempting to escape what he feels is an inane existence in his hometown by going to college. The people around him are all obsessed with stupid, frivolous things, which the film demonstrates by having them constantly blast “Butterfly”.
When the main character finally makes it to a college party, he expects to find a more cultured set of people who have the same high-minded interests as him. What he actually finds is a house full of drunken girls who would rather dance to “Butterfly” than talk about literature.
It’s a clever scene that works to the main character back down to earth and re-enforces that old adage, “people are people, wherever you go.” It’s also a well-observed piece of filmmaking, because as anyone who turned on the radio during the spring and summer of 2001 could tell you, there was a long stretch of time where “Butterfly” was completely inescapable.
With a guitar line sampled from a Red Hot Chili Peppers song and a hook that literally invited the listener to dance along (“Come my lady/Come, come, my lady/You’re my butterfly, sugar, baby”) it isn’t hard to see why “Butterfly” was a hit.
But it’s also a paper-thin song with lyrics spat out by the ridiculous-looking white-boy-rappers Shifty Shellshock and Epic Mazur.
Like a lot of frivolous pop songs, it’s pleasant enough on the first listen. But “Butterfly” was inescapable. Radio, movie trailers, commercials, and loudspeaker at the supermarket: it conquered them all.
That once-catchy chorus got old fast.
Eventually “Butterfly” disappeared from the radio, and Crazy Town went with it. But people still remember their one big hit, even if it’s just the chorus. Since they made such a lasting contribution to pop culture, maybe it’d be worthwhile to check out the rest of their catalogue. I’m sure it won’t be the most obnoxious music ever, right?
Right?
The Album: The Gift of Game
As I mentioned before, the basis for the music in “Butterfly” is a sampled guitar line from a Red Hot Chili Peppers song.
Since “Butterfly” was Crazy Town’s only hit, most people have never heard what their songs sound like when the band composes their own music. The average person might be surprised to learn that, while “Butterfly” is a laid-back dance-able slice of pop-rap, the rest of Crazy Town’s debut album, The Gift of Game, is nu-metal rock-rap of the most obnoxious type.
If you asked me to sum it up, I’d describe it as “Limp Biskit, but worse”.
I know that sounds like a gross exaggeration—an outright impossibility, even—and there was a time when I couldn’t have conceived of a more obnoxious front man than Fred Durst, but Crazy Town gives us two: Shifty Shellshock and Epic Mazur.
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| On the left in the sunglasses (Epic Mazur) and Shifty Shellshock (with the pretty fingernails) |
These two rhythmically challenged, terminally tattooed bros spend most of this album spitting weak raps about their criminal activities and bragging about their sex-and-drug-fueled party lifestyle. There’s a place in pop music for that kind of boasting, but if it’s going to be anything but annoying, it needs to be accompanied by plenty of charisma and talent.
And boy, these two guys don’t have any of that.
Listening to this album is a punishing, irritating experience.
When the first song kicks in with the generic drums and ceaseless nu-metal shredding, I tried to keep some perspective. It was the late 90’s, after all, and this sort of thing was popular. Plus, there are a few songs from that period that I enjoy. I was cautiously optimistic.
But all that optimism vanished when Shifty and Epic annihilated any potential liability by dropping this line: “So —- the critics/we leave ‘em hangin’ like INXS.”
For those of you who don’t get that “joke”, the lead singer of INXS committed suicide by hanging himself. So, if you find yourself smacking your lips right now, trying to figure out where all that bad taste came from, that’s probably it.
Look, I listen to a lot of rap. I understand that sometimes, an MC will make an offensive joke, and sometimes I even enjoy it. But the same way you don’t tell a dirty joke to someone the first time you meet them, you can’t throw out a line like that in the first song of your first album. Especially when both that song and that album are devoid of wit or talent.
Then What Happened
The one upside to recording an album that makes people to say, “It can’t get any worse than this” is that they might be right.
And in this case, I was.
In 2002, Crazy Town released their second album, Darkhorse, and it is a major step up from their debut. The lyrics are still shallow and undeveloped, but at least they deal with human emotions, and the music may still be dull and grunge-y, but at least the songs have melodies. Epic and Shifty both devote more time to singing and less to shouting. It’s not a great album (I’d describe it as “Linkin Park but not as good”) but it’s listenable, and for this band, that’s a near-miracle.
After Darkhorse failed to perform commercially, the band went on hiatus and several of the members pursued other musical projects. The quality of these projects varies—from guitarist Rust Epique’s unique-but-boring album 22nd Century Lifestyle to Adam Goldstein’s semi-famous work as DJ AM—but none of it is as bad as Crazy Town’s first album.
Shifty famously contributed vocals to Paul Oakenfold’s “Starry Eyed Surprise”, a song that resembles “Butterfly” in both its catchy, summer-friendly nature and the fact that it was severely overplayed.
Still, it’s the closest anyone in Crazy Town ever came to re-capturing the magic. Shifty followed up with his solo album, Happy Love Sick, which was just as lyrically shallow as anything else he’d done, but it had a pop sensibility and a fun, light air to it.
Sadly, both DJ AM and Rust Epique have passed away in recent years. This, along with Shifty’s ongoing battles with addiction, makes a Crazy Town reunion more or less impossible. We’ll never know if the band could have continued their upswing in musical quality or even produced another maddeningly catchy, impossible-to-avoid single.
However, the surviving members of Crazy Town have actually produced a few new songs in the past two years.
They’re not terrible. The music is inoffensive and Shifty and Epic seem to have an improved sense of rhythm.
But I don’t think we’ll be hearing them in another Colin Hanks movie any time soon.
