I’m just going to throw this out there: When was the last time you heard “Butterfly” by Crazy Town? The reason I ask is because I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with a lede for an entirely different, now-abandoned topic, and I asked myself the above question, after which I wondered aloud why I started thinking about Crazy Town in the first place. Had they been in a meme recently? Had I scrolled across some kind of subtle algorithmic suggestion? Did Crazy Town visit me in a dream? Perhaps it was all three of these things, and if that’s the case, who set this near-subliminal promotion of Crazy Town in motion and for what reason?
In my estimation, Crazy Town, a one-hit wonder rap-rock group from the year 2000, is the band equivalent of a half-red, half-primer ’97 Integra, lowered and glass-packed, stuck on the curb part of mall parking lot entry ramp, its interior climate a miasma of clove cigarettes, Ozium spray, and shwag weed, all of which makes a complementary atmosphere for the soggy Taco Bell cup leaking diluted Baja Blast onto a dead Bic and some pocket change rattling around the bottom of a beverage holder. Beneath the driver’s seat of the Crazy Town car is an Ecstasy pill, cut with speed and lost forever in the summer of ’99, slowly disappearing into a cocoon of carpet fibers, caliche dust, and the unpinchable crumbs fallen from the bottom of a thousand Cool Ranch Dorito bags. What emerges from the cocooned pill in the bottom of the Crazy Town car is not a butterfly but a song, called, as it happens, “Butterfly,” though it is actually more like a nü metal moth, beating around your head in a relentless attempt to lay an earworm in your brain.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know this song, and I bet you don’t either. Can you hear the opening guitar line in your head? Because I can. Its tone is mewling and single-minded, slithering across my brain like the arm of some goateed slimeball reaching across the back of a booth in a dark club to touch a drunk girl’s shoulder. Sonically, it’s disgusting, like the offer of a Cuervo shot when you’re already drunk enough to fall off a barstool. You know you’re going to throw up, but you take the shot anyway, which basically describes me pulling “Butterfly” up on Spotify. I didn’t even get to the vocals before I stopped the track. What does it feel like for your brain to puke? I quit before that happened. My Brain Crazy Town Concentration is apparently well past the legal limit already.
But to further explore why I might have thought of this band, I looked to see if they were booked nearby anytime soon. They are not, though they did play The Rail in November 2021, so I still do not comprehend how or why Crazy Town was incepted into my mind. Maybe it just happened, a so-called random thought, unbidden by any outside interloper or motivation, but I don’t really believe that, because random thoughts basically feel like advertisements to me. There are no coincidences, just moments along a million individual buy-cycles that masquerade as coincidences. Whatever the far-flung consequences wrought by the flutter of “Butterfly” are, I hope I’ve done my part in their sequence. I don’t want to hear the phrase “sugarrr, babyyy” ever again. — Steve Steward
Contact HearSay at Anthony@FWWeekly.com.
