In any case.
Butterfly was one of those "all the rage" songs that played everywhere, and me with a newfound interest in rap, I took a listen. It was one of those an-hour-an-mp3 songs that I had on my computer, but I just wasn't sure about the album itself. I had other albums in my hands, and I wasn't going to put money down on something I hadn't listened to (an attitude that'd see a comeback in later years.) But then, Revolving Door came out, and I decided that I really liked the guys. It would take a week with my honorary cousin (who was calling himself MC Oxide and was into rap as well*) in the summer for me to give it a go and fall in love with it.
See, rap metal was a stranger to me then, I only knew the label given to some of the other stuff I was listening to (nu-metal) but the mixture of what I had gotten accustomed to in my Metallica days and this new stuff was very attractive. Not only that, but CrazyTown, to my astonishment, had not one, but two guys on vocal duty. The raspy styles of Shifty Shellshock and the more even punches of Epic Mazur, the interplay between them throughout, and the marriage of hip-hop beats to rock made for a marvelous listen.
Because while it opened with the stomper Toxic that had even more interesting shit than I thought could be written in rap (the talk of chromosomes and DNA that Epic throws in made me smile), it is mostly a mixture of fun, hard-hitting tracks like Only When I'm Drunk, Think Fast, Face the Music, B-Boy 2000; it also had moments that were depressive in a "light it up, lean back, get depressed" sort of way. Black Cloud, Lollipop Porn* and Revolving Door (which was always a summer depression song to me) brought a bit of mellow, a bit of down (that they'd amplify by hundred-fold in the follow-up, but that's for later.) Years later, the chorus of Black Cloud would catch me unawares as I smoked a cigarette, half drunk and down in the gutter: "A thousand cigarettes won't change the way we feel." I remember wondering: why not? Why won't it? "Can you bear the thought of knowing truth?" In that moment, yes, I could, because I already knew.
To this day, I hold CrazyTown's first two albums* to high esteem not because they were unquestionably masterpieces of music, no. Even then, they were a much-maligned band, often considered to be the lowest of low, often because they had gotten famous over a sampled track. But it's none of those. CrazyTown has a specific flavour, or flava as I'm supposed to say. It wasn't everyone's cup of tea back then, it sure as fuck isn't now, but I've always liked them, myself.
Perhaps because the 2000 bands represent a time in my life when I was learning more, feeling more, and starting to move towards what would just two years ago diagnosed as bipolar I, and CrazyTown cut a swath across my entire specrum in a way I could relate to, back in the day.
But that's a minor blip compared to what a likewise much-maligned man with the red cap on backwards would do to my life.
*Footnotes: 1- Pretty Little Ditty by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
2- Jury's out on the third, sure-took-your-time-you-assholes release, The Brimstone Sluggers, which, incidentally, was supposed to be the band's name when they started out.
3- While the sexual nature of the song was, without a doubt, a high selling point for a still hormonal teenager that I was, what stuck with me was Epic's lines in the chorus: "All caught up now, takin' my chances playin' my song / while the Devil dances 'round me, beggin' me to play along"
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