Korn - Follow the Leader (1998)

"I'm torn like Korn playin' 'Follow the Leader'" is a CrazyTown line that I would hear during the Bratislava years.  How odd, I remember thinking, I don't remember thinking that that album was particularly torn.  It was something else, that's for sure, but torn? No.

Follow the Leader was the last member of the 2000 brigade, and the one I got to last.  Because I didn't even know this band even existed, it was hearsay in a music magazine I was picking up every month, but I hadn't seen or heard them... no songs on the internet either.  No information besides liner notes in Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Falvored Water, which gave the band a mention, and a throwaway line in Indigo Flow.  From what little I could piece together (yes, the internet was still taking baby turtle steps), this Korn was connected deeply to Limp Bizkit.  Further reading on the subject, courtesy of magazines borrowed from friends, said that whoever this band was, they had been the ones who made Limp Bizkit famous*.

It was a stroke of luck that it wasn't Issues (1999) that got into my hands first, mainly because I had, oddly enough, heard more praise for Follow the Leader from the scant few people I had heard it from.  So I was stuck with what I was stuck with, but Fred Durst was there to sweeten the deal for me with the track All In the Family.

Upon first listen, I failed to see what the hype was all about.  Until that point, I had been used to jumpy, hard pounding, upper-mid tempo tracks, a lot of rapping, perhaps some screams here and there, but all done in a certain rock/metal-like style.  If Papa Roach was like punk, and Linkin Park was like rock, and Limp Bizkit was like a super-charged hip-hop, the likes of which I'd see again*... but Korn was a different blend.  It was crunchier, heavier, fuzzier, slower, more metal in its execution than the ones I had seen before.  Jonathan Davis didn't rap, he sung, and the things he did with his voice were strange and unusual in the Beetlejuice sense.  Fieldy's slap bass was a noise I was not familiar with, especially with the way he used it.

At the heart of Follow the Leader is a groove I can't quite put the words.  Perhaps it's that their music was a bit more complex than what I was used to, owing much to the dynamic relationship between Munky and Head, and the fact that David Silvera, while prone to it, was a much more rock-oriented drummer.  The moods they put forward made my nauseous at the time, especially with Jonathan Davis' vocalizations: that he used his own crooning voice as instruments to add to choruses was a new idea for me.

At first, I didn't like it at all.  But there were interesting songs - the groovy It's On, the harder Dead Bodies Everywhere (more my "style"), the unexpected Reclaim My Place with it's addictive main riff*; or the bleaker, emptier, summer depression of Got the Life, the nausea-inducing spiral of B.B.K., the sickening Pretty, which was downfilled, depressive, violent but of course, utterly beautiful for all these things.

But perhaps the most stand-out, enhanced by the presence of my then-fashion icon, was All In the Family.  It wasn't just the weird, saw-like riff, the grumbling bass, the simpler riff, the lapse into full-blown hip-hop during Fred Durst's verses, or the heavier, darker, sicker verses spat by Jonathan Davis, all coming together in an apocalyptic ("Because it's doomsday, kid, it's doomsday"), playground-battlefield style direct trading of sentiments ("I hate you!") was simply delectable.  Of course, the homoerotic conclusion, I never saw coming.  I remember laughing out loud even after the track was done, what a twist!

The bigger twist however, was leaving the tape running with my headphones on after Side B was done and getting hit in the face with a hidden track, the name of which I couldn't find in the cassette booklet.  I didn't know just what the hell this rockin' riff set to a weird, unfamiliar (possibly guest, I thought) vocals telling the story of a kid who wanted desperately to crossdress against his mother's protestations - perhaps he was transsexual, but I got the impression that he was doing it for the hell of it.  Then the kid became a rockstar, got rich, owned stocks and all that shit near the end of the world, and then the riff slowed down... first gradually, and then to an unforgettable snail's pace. I listened to it five, six times in a row, I was blown away - this was so weird, so insane, so quirky that I was stuck.  What the hell was this?

Well whatever it was, it was easily the best song on the whole damn album.  Years later, I would learn that the song was called Earache My Eye and was a Cheech Marin cover.  Live and learn, but this was the first instance of my bad track record with knowing or detecting cover songs.

Follow the Leader was also an album true to its cover - sickly greens and browns, something childish but unkempt, deadly like a game of hopscotch right at the edge of a cliff.  And it is decidedly either a spring or summer album.

Unfortunately, my Korn tangent came full circle, and I don't think Follow the Leader or any Korn album for that matter, aged well.  They kind of didn't.  But back then, it was another name on the list that piqued my interest - if they could pull off Earache My Eye, what else was out there?

*Footnotes: 1- This "helping someone blow up" thing would also appear later with Staind, about whom Fred Durst had remarked, according to a magazine article about nu-metal, "they don't seem to remember us." I would learn years later when I got a bit into Staind that Aaron Lewis would do supporting vocals on the song No Sex on their legendary/breakout album Significant Other (1999.) See next entry.
2- Which was Cypress Hill's 2001 single Trouble from the album Stoned Raiders.
3- It's very highly debatable if nu-metal power chord variations could be called riffs, but at the time, I thought they undisputably were, so I'm keeping it like that.

Papa Roach - Infest (2000)

Viva la cucaracha!

Actually, no, wait, no, fuck that.  I hate cockroaches.  Mostly because after my grandmother's death, we had started spending the summers, about a month's worth of 'em anyway, with my grandfather at his house in Datça.  The other reason was that as I was going to a private school, so would my sister, as our parents never did something for one that they didn't do for the other, and we were barely scraping by as a result.  It was free accomodation, and the most distinctive quality of the once-pristine beach (spitting distance from the house, sand nice and white) was the presence of cockroaches.

I don't like insects, but cockroaches are a different kind of horror altogether.  And Datça was a haven for those suckers - worse still, the source of the neverending barrage of cockroaches was a storm drain near a neighbor's garden, and he refused to have the garden disturbed to take care of what actually was a sanitation problem.  My grandfather didn't help.  He was an entomologist, a legendary professor in Turkey, and he held nothing but fascination for those infernal things.  Sure, he took care of one if we screamed for him to do so, bless his heart, but ultimately, he rarely ever saw insects as we did.

The house is gone now, sold after my grandfather's Parkinson's and dementia began to pick up speed, but I remember turning it into a game - we would bet on how many days it'd be before we got scared shitless by a cockroach.

How is all this relevant? For one, the album I am about to talk about was one of my favourite things that summer, in part because I discovered with it that albums can have seasons.  It's kind of like synesthesia with me, just not the whole nine: albums can have seasons, or times of day.  Instruments or songs can have colours*.

So colour me surprised when I laid down on my bed, put the headphones on, got the cassette booklet, and ran through it.  That's how Papa Roach's Infest got me shouting for something I would sooner kill than celebrate.

Of course, they were somewhat familiar.  Wherever I had gotten my information from (I don't recall), I had downloaded an mp3 of Last Resort and had loved it.  But the full experience of Infest was something else.  There was something very dirty about it, and not just the cover - the sound was dirty.  The album felt like picking dirt from between my teeth.  Polished, but still maintaining a garage aesthetic at times, the sound itself was like a punch to the gut delivered on demand: painful, but you asked for it.  Consider the tamer songs like Binge, Between Angels & Insects, or Tightrope, and they were slower, but no less punchier.  Of course my favourites were the harder and faster numbers like Infest, Thrown Away, Snakes, Blood Brothers or Dead Cell.  Snakes was so badass at the time that it was my second favourite.

My first? Why, Revenge, of course.  From its opening hit, the guitars during the verse, the way the chorus seemed to confirm my own theory on love ("can't live with, or without"), to the pure hip-hop bridge... but the lyrics got it.  The destructive force of love, expressed in the violent revenge of a domestic abuse victim, likening her to a Godzilla-like behemoth that, in my mind, was preparing to devour New York.  From the depths of the ocean to the concrete kingdom, in pain and hungry to inflict it.

I might add that Thrown Away set my standard for "going out with a bang." If you're not gonna go out on a somber note, then wreck your shit on your way out.

Coby Dick* was a big factor in me digging this.  As an aspiring rapper/lyricist*, I was impressed by his delivery, his rhymes and his in-your-face, vicious punches.  Pick a song, any song, and there's at least one quotable.  Perhaps my favourite was Blood Brothers, where the chorus kept moving from periphery to center, just to say "It's in our nature to kill." Then again, Dead Cell's "Plug 'em in and then turn 'em on - process the data, make yourself the bomb" always conjured up the image of a cyborg suicide bomber.  How appropriate, as I was no stranger to suicide bombings, terrorism, or science fiction.  But it also spoke to something else in me, the feeling that as I processed more data, learned more, observed more, I was getting more irritable (yes, that wasn't because I was a hotheaded teen, exactly, but I didn't know that then.) I was like that, "He don't know what he's doing, he just keeps getting by."

Besides which, Broken Home was a masterpiece in my view, especially the ping-pong delay guitar bit that kicks it off, its lonely-but-furious-about-it attitude... everythin. While I didn't learn what the title meant until the Bratislava years, having witnessed some inter-parent conflicts, I carried sentiments similar to those in the song (I hadn't seen nothin' yet.)

I perceived my father as cold and distant, not abusive as Coby Dick depicts it (perhaps not explicitly, but it's heavily implied.), but generally absent and uncaring.  It wasn't grounded in observation, to be sure, but what the hell did I know?

Infest is another member of the 2000 brigade that has stood up to the test of time, in that, if I listen to it today, and I did while writing this, I can still derive the same amount of enjoyment from it as I did the first few hundred times around.

*Footnote: 1-Recently, while trying to compose a song, I kept thinking with every VST preset I tried that the lead I was looking for had to be "greener" or "a bit less green" than the ones I was trying, one after the other.  I found it, and it was similar to one I had used in another song, which was a sort of aquamarine blue-green.
2- Why the fuck he dropped this name I never understood.  Although Jacoby Shaddix is
3- It never became more than that aspiration, mainly because I began writing not to make it into a song or anything, but to have written it.  Writing for myself didn't mean that I wasn't a lyricist - I just had no songs to put 'em on, which, to me, is not that big a deficit.

Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory (2000)

So the year was still 2000, and nu-metal was this big thing, except I didn't even know the term.  I had what I had, and I regularly tuned into MTV, and the Turkish cousin (Number 1MTV) to catch music videos of my then-favourite artists.  It was around that time that a pestilence began to appear on the TV in our living room - some spikey-haired blonde asshole and a dude with a guitar who also sung, or sort of just spoke in the in between the singing.  They had other guys, they were all wearing black, the video seemed to be about domestic abuse, and I hated it.

Why? Well, I hadn't really listened to it, see.  I just didn't like it because it was everywhere.  I would call myself an anti-populist at the time, even though I was actually listening to what was very popular... just popular elsewhere.

When I did, Crawling made a big impact.  This was way darker than anything I had in my hands at the time, and yes it was simple, but the delivery was fucking excellent.  The lyrics were also easily relatable, "Confusing what is real" sounded like actually taken from the notes of my first psychologist*.

Of course, I had these thoughts while I was at a friend's place - she was the daughter of a family friend (our fathers were childhood buddies), and she was into this Linkin Park or whatever they were called.  We "lucked out" and caught Crawling on the TV, but what we hadn't noticed, was that her mother had actually come in to tell us that the tea was ready, and seen us transfixed, so she had just stood there.  When the song ended, she announced her presence with a comment: "This type of music just tires me out nowadays.  I think I'm getting old."

So one day, with the album added to her list, my mother returned with Hybrid Theory and two others.  Hybrid Theory had the distinction of not coming with a parental advisory sticker, which intrigued me, as I had come to regard that sticker as a sign that said, "BUY THIS." That sticker meant that any album cover it tarnished hid an album that had a very real chance of being incredible.

Anyway.  As it so happened, the lightbulb in my room went out, and all I had was the dim lights of my table lamp, but since the cassette was one of those that didn't have the lyrics included, I just closed my door, drew the curtains as I was afraid of the dark, stuck it in and hit 'play.'

Nothing was the same after that.

The paranoid, twitchy, madness-inducing, under-my-skin shock of Papercut, triggering visions of a nightmarish body horror face growing out of my arms sent me into a place I didn't know existed.  I had just struck gold.  Was it the atmosphere of the opener, the dream-like verses of With You*, or the playful rhythm of A Place for My Head? The wet-concrete and chainlink fence imagery of Runaway and the sentiment, I could relate to; Pushing Me Away was every adolescent half-infatuation; In the End was the idea I was entertaining at the time, while wondering how I would commit suicide - that none of the vast number of things mattered at all*.  Points of Authority was rebellion for me, but I was too stubborn to forfeit the game.  Let them put my name to shame, I didn't have the former to begin with, and shame, I lived with every day.

Or was it maybe the enduring truth of By Myself? "I ask why, but in my mind, I find (that) I can't rely on myself."

It wasn't just that Hybrid Theory came from a place that I was lost in at the time.  It's because Hybrid Theory is still a damn good album.  Chester Bennington's unique and powerful voice carried a high emotional charge; Mike Shinoda's lyrics and delivery are both impeccable - some of the basic but effective lines he spits are endlessly quotable and can be quite profound.  The most problem metalheads at the time had with these new bands was not in any of those.  See, if I had to term it as I termed it then, metal is primarily melodic.  The riffs, the solos, they're all far more complex than the average Linkin Park song; by contrast, Linkin Park's music is rhythmic more than anything.  That's what allows the hip hop angle to creep in - I don't think many cared all that much for Joe Hahn's turntables, more that it featured very little chord progression or variety.

But that was just it, see.  Linkin Park, and Hybrid Theory needed it not.  Sure, it's basic to me now, after I've branched out very far from its near vicinity, but the album had everything I wanted at the time, things I didn't know they did in these things, and a healthy dose of relatable lyrics.  Sure, it might seem juvenile, but some of the sentiments expressed are universal enough that one can find oneself in them.  The chorus of Runaway is a testament to that.  Speaking of which, this album was the one that I had decided had the quintessential "closer."

Pushing Me Away is that song.  It has that undertone of finality, the bitterness of having to say goodbye to something so captivating and, if you were so inclined, so warm and comfortable.  That small pain in your chest at the thought of leaving it behind, of going away.  Ever since Hybrid Theory, that has been how I perceived good closers to be: glorious, but painful just the same.

As I said in the beginning, Hybrid Theory came bundled with a few more items, one of which had to do with an insect type I have nothing but contempt for... cockroaches.

*Footnotes: 1- I lost my grandmother when I was 13 or 14 (never kept track, because she's gone and that's just that), and having never met something like death, I first became fascinated with the subject, and then, perhaps due to the trouble I was having at school, perhaps apart from it, developed suicidal ideations that continue to this day.  I was diagnosed major depressive, which would later be revised to bipolar I once I was over 21.
2- While "My December" was the one that I couldn't listen to as it hurt just too much, "With You" still haunts me to this day.  Perhaps because I associated it with a recurring dream of mine where, wearing all white, I float in the air in a vast room.  There's a cube in the middle of the room, just rotating, and it looks small, but I know it's huge.  I have the urge to drift towards the cube, and run my finger along the length of an edge, corner to corner.  I know that when I do that, I will feel sick inside, a type of throat-to-intestine nausea will come over me, but I do it anyway, and then I float around the cube, under it, touching its edges, feeling sicker and sicker and sicker every time... this dream stopped about three years ago.
3- Yes, that's not what the song is about.  But it was, back then.

Limp Bizkit - Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$ (1997 - Tangent)

Limp Bizkit would also start off a little DIY project.  I have a knack for bringing different elements together, and I love puzzles, and it helped me a lot over the years, and this time was not an exception.

So the story goes: I had gotten a small sound system, I guess the term would be, for either my birthday, or a religious holiday, I don't really recall.  This sucker had a slot for a cassette tape, and a CD player, two fuck-me speakers and a bass boost that I turned off in no time at all.  It also had a headphone extension, which I used sometimes to listen to Phil Collins' Another Day in Paradise to cry when I couldn't sleep (a tradition that lives on, albeit with different music.) This was actually before I had gotten Ride the Lightning, but in any case.

I was collecting cassettes at this time, as CD's were too expensive.  I didn't have the money to buy a discman, and a walkman was much more portable anyway.  When the same mp3 site I'd been using clued me into a song called Pollution by one of my favourite bands at the time, I happened to talk to a schoolmate about it.  He was strange, in that I never knew if we were friends or if we were enemies, or if I hurt him too much.  He had been one of the scant few, and mostly innocent, targets of my rare and rather apathetic actions, but he was alright, and he loved Bizkit much as I did.  He told me that he actually had their first album on tape, but it was impossible now, it was all CD's.

I don't know how many stores I went to.  I remember losing my patience at the end of a very long day of bus rides, exhausting every possibility, and snapping: "No, I need this on a cassette, god damn it, I need it on motherfucking cassette!"

But no.  CD's everywhere.  This would, in later years, translate to "digital downloads everywhere." Some things never change.

Begrudgingly, I bought the CD.  I spun it a couple of times, and it was pretty damn good, but I couldn't take it with me! Then a little "record" button on the tape player's row caught my attention.  I bought an empty tape, popped it in, put the CD on, and transferred it.  I emptied out the only Backstreet Boys album I had (yeah, I had one, if you must know.) Now for the sleeve... I had a scanner and a printer, both came in handy in creating a low-quality sleeve cut out of A4 paper, the track names written in Times New Roman on the inside of it, and I had my cassette copy of Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$.  I was proud of myself.  Alright, so it wasn't an official copy, but what could I have done? I had worked with the materials I had been given.

Now almost twenty years after the fact, Three Dollar Bill, Yall$ is, to me, the best album Limp Bizkit has ever recorded.  Significant Other (1999) is a very close second, but one thing it isn't, is perfect.  Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$ is perfect.  The first thing I had noticed, even with Pollution was how raw it was, how much force was crammed into it.  That's the thing, really, as this album isn't just Limp Bizkit's breakout (as arguably, Significant Other was what made them), it's also one of their hardest, most versatile albums.  It's darker than its successors, it's harder, it has more of the downer moments that I adore(d.)

Yes, even when they are over-the-top enough to be tongue-in-cheek.

I mean, how else can I term songs like Sour, Clunk, Nobody Loves Me or even better, Indigo Flow, which is a tribute song, a shout-out song but manages to cram that special kind of dark into it? Or one of the best renditions of George Michael's Faith ever recorded? But it wasn't all just that, because the (to me) experimental Counterfeit, the breathless Pollution, the mid-tempo but plenty groovy Stuck and the white-knuckle tight Leech brought different flavours, different moods.  It's perhaps before the band and, more like Fred, began to enjoy their fame a bit too much, because there is something very punk about it all.  Very fuck-it, very our-own-rules, which makes it all the more special.

Thing is, maybe a year after the fact, I would discover another* one of those anime AMV's which were the first examples of memes.  It was Limp Bizkit's version of Faith set to scenes from one of my favourite animes, Golden Boy.  This was during the Bratislava years, and the CD that held this little AMV also housed what has been, ever since I watched it, my favourite movie of all time - Ghost in the Shell.  But that'll be mentioned in its own separate entry.

For now, there is still the not-so small matter of the rest of the 2000 brigade.  I'm thinking, a band that I had done everything I could to avoid at first, because their music video was everywhere, all the time, and I just hadn't found it all that amazing... yet.

I'm talking about Super Xero of course.

*Footnotes: 1- The first is of course the Final Fantasy IV-VIII compilation AMV set to The Offspring's Staring at the Sun.  It had come out of a demo CD that a monthly gaming magazine I bought every month gave with every issue.

Limp Bizkit - Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (2000)

So imagine watching MTV one day, perchance to run into something nice, and suddenly, this... thing... comes on.  It's so expletive-ridden that it's almost halfway gone to the silent-censors.  But it's pounding, it's energetic, it's the type of guys you're used to seeing now, on top of a skyscraper, and the song is (to put it in the vernacular) bangin' to the fullest extent of it.  It's an earworm, and it's stuck in your head.

Well, that was how Limp Bizkit's My Generation was for me.

From the moment I got my hands on a casette of Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (and after wondering why they spelled "flavoured" like that*) until the moment the tape ended, I was mezmerized.  It wasn't just that this was an even more expletive-ridden fuck-fest not even Eminem could manage in my eyes; it was the whole thing.  The attitude, the rockin' instruments, Sam Rivers' talents with the bass, John Otto's beats, Wes Borland's riffing, or just the overbearing, magnificent presence of Fred Durst (DJ Lethal gets the "honorable mention") it was one of my favourite things in the whole world.

Fred Durst in particular, with his larger-than-life presence and trademark cap, became a style icon of sorts for me.  In Turkey, it was very uncommon then to do what I was doing, but I did it - I had a Toronto Blue Jays cap*, fleece hoodies were in style, and I had no shortage of sneakers.  I also had this pair of Marks & Spencer cargo pants that had zippers right under the knee, where you could detach the lower pant leg completely and make shorts of 'em.  It was all the rage at school, where we had Wednesdays as casual days*. Before long, I was taking cues from Limp Bizkit videos on how to combine clothing items.

Of course, the album was nothing to sneeze at, too.  From the unabashedly vulgar Hot Dog (which I didn't even know had a Trent Reznor diss in its chorus, something I learned after the fact) to the pumpin' Livin' It Up and Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle) to the delectable 'fuck you' track Full Nelson... in fact, that song was what taught me the phrase, "your mouth's writing checks that your ass can't cash," that I had to ask one of our English teachers, who was American.  But it doesn't end there - there isn't one among you whom had watched the Mission: Impossible TV series, fallen in love with the theme tune who wouldn't enjoy Take a Look Around.  And for someone who liked rap, or just a fine specimen of rap, Rollin' (Urban Assault Vehicle) was a treat, too.

I never cared much for My Way or Hold On, just to clarify.  The former seemed a bit of a bore, and the latter... well, let's just say, the latter was just... no.

But among all the great tracks, Boiler always stood out, as it does.  It wasn't the darkness that I loved in Boiler, it was rather that it seemed to be about either a break-up (which I hadn't experienced yet) or just a big "fuck you" to a particularly despicable person... but the smashed instruments, the delivery, the bleak, almost downfilled aspect of it always hit close to home.  Because I didn't know thing one about relationships at the time, my perception was guided by tracks like this.  Interesting enough, I would discover just how destructive love actually is.

But Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water did more than just guide my fashion sense, insofar as I had one, or to give me a sense of what this member of the 2000 brigade would end up leading to.  First thing it did was to make me chase music videos.  Just the music wasn't enough, I had to see it visualized, no matter how ridiculous it might've been.  Also, I learned the dances, the moves, I learned to lose myself in the rhythm, the rumbling bass, the feeling that, yeah, fuck you all! Performance-wise, Fred Durst was always a favourite, because while he was made fun of for trying to do the Michael Jackson backstage, he got some moves.

Second, it taught me to manage my money.  By extension, the 2000 brigade was all written down on an ever-expanding spare notepad page (my first album list), given to my dear mother who, while I was in school, would often head out.  She was instructed to buy any item on the list that I could afford.  I had asked her to not go easy on me - if I didn't have the dough, I wouldn't be gettin' nothin', and that was that.

Third, I went from the object of ridicule and bullying to the wannabe kid whom could be use to embarass teachers and entertain classmates by making him perform solo renditions of Limp Bizkit songs, often the full crotch-grabbing, jump-the-fuck-up dances.  Part of me goes red-faced when I recall this, but another part of me remembers having fun, and loving the attention.  Because even though the eyes on me were on me for different reasons, at least they weren't on me with condscension or abject superiority.  Of course, it got old, but I enjoyed it at the time - deathly scared of it, but digging it, something I would later term the "introextrovert's dilemma." I'm sure I'll get to that eventually.

The 2000 brigade's other members have different, but similar stories, but before that, there has to be a tangent about formats and the lengths I went to just to get a copy of a particular album... Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$.

*Footnotes: 1- My English teachers were disputing whether to use the American or British spelling of words when teaching us, but my favourite one was adamant that the British spelling should be considered the original / the default.  As such, I didn't learn to spell words without the 'u's until I got to the university level, and was chided rather harshly for using a hybrid of American and British spellings.
2- That cap was never worn prior to Limp Bizkit.  My uncle on my mother's side is a naturalized Canadian citizen, and the cap had been a gift from him.
3- In Turkey, at least when I was a schoolboy, the drill was that Wednesdays were casual clothing days, but the rest of the week, everyone had to wear school uniforms.

CrazyTown - The Gift of Game (1999)

CrazyTown's The Gift of Game (1999) may have gotten the band fame through a sample used* in their breakout hit Butterfly (which came out in 2000,) but what is often missed is that the album has more in it than what it gets credit for.  If nothing else, Jay Gordon (Orgy) is on the damn thing (one song, but he is, so that's that.)

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"

Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)

I guess if you're not living under a rock, you know that rap music changed forever once again, when Eminem's third full-length album dropped and showed that beyond Snow, beyond Vanilla Ice, white boys can spit... and in his case, be the best of the best as well.  Yes, Eminem owes quite a lot to Dr. Dre, but beyond that, one fact everyone must recognize: dude can rap.

Of course, tell it to a kid whose only previous experience with rap was the funny music video of Cypress Hill's still-legendary hit, Insane in the Brain, and the needs-no introduction Informer by Snow (which I might've known only as "licky boom-boom down" due to Snow's heavy Jamaican accent.) I became the kid who is suddenly hit in the face with songs like My Name Is, Stan, The Real Slim Shady, Guilty Conscience, The Way I Am... and this was so different than what I was used to, so outside the zone I usually inhabited.  It was sort of like the Manhattan Transfer for me, because the words took center stage and the music was just there to back them up.  The flow that I didn't even know existed, the ebb and flow of it, the continuous chain of words was absolutely fascinating to me.

But it wasn't just how Em was saying it, it was what he was saying.  The Marshall Mathers LP seemed to house this reflection of me at every turn.  The vile hatred, the rampant violence, the sick-in-the-head humour, these were some of my favourite things.  When he said something like "You better get rid of that nine, it ain't gonna help / what good is it gonna do 'gainst a man who strangles himself?" I burst out laughing; or found the sickening, violent, delirious, adrenaline-fuelled hot-blooded murder of Kim ("there's a four year old little boy layin' dead with a slit throat / in YOUR living room! / Ha-ha, what, you think I'm kiddin' you?") blood-curdling, but loved the scenery of it.

It was with songs like Kim that I was starting to see into the songs, get flashes of visual cues, imagine how the entire scene would unfold... bare trees in the humid woods, one dark night, dead leaves underfoot, an old Chevy down the road*, cars passing by every once in a while, Eminem with the knife, Kim in sweats and no shoes, and the events leading/building up to that point coming and going in flashbacks... that was what I saw, what I still see.

It was exciting for me, because the sheer unapologetic nature of his spitting, when combined with his earworm flows drilled it in deep.  From the laid-back attitude of I'm Back to the deliberately nasty attitude of Remember Me? and Amityville (featuring D12!) to the juvenile fun of Criminal and the confused yet "what the hell?" of Who Knew? it was magnificent: of course, the trademark "skits" that I would follow and take cues from (Paul and Steve Berman in particular)

Listen to it now, it's still the monumental, no-holds-barred shit you ever put in your ears.  Of course, it is part of an unholy trinity, as its predecessor (which very few people went back to) and successor (which was widely celebrated as a tour-de-force) were also amazing.

I remember being fascinated by rap as a form of poetry*; you had to rhyme, you had to be clever, you had to stay on topic but meander in between.  It wasn't like regular poetry, or any other kind of lyricism I'd heard then - unrestrained, blunt yet eloquent, a way to vent but to do it with style.  Of course, rap takes a lot of language skills and slang knowledge, as well as knowledge about the music itself.  I got the more baser things.  I knew who Tupac and Biggie were, I caught the more contemporary references, but some expressions went over my head and took some time to get a grasp on.  I understood other references even less - I didn't learn the whole "Slim Anus" references were supposed to be about a beef Eminem was having with the Insane Clown Posse.

But what about my first love, heavy metal? Well, Eminem would be part of a hybrid army that took over popular / "heavy" music in the first few years of the 2000's.

*Footnotes: 1- It had to be a Chevrolet Nova, because, well, after the family car became obsolete by any definition, my father went out to sell it, and to get a new one with some of the cash he'd saved... and ended up being talked to buying a beat-up Chevrolet Nova that had been the official vehicle to Turkey's then President of the Republic, Süleyman Demirel, back when he was in the Justice Party (Adalet Partisi.) Having loved the Nova "N", and knowing it meant "new" in some languages, I would later choose my rap name as NoVA because I loved the damn thing.  Of course, frequenting rap forums, I would be hit in a friendly semi-battle situation with the line "Who the fuck name heself after a pussy car?" which was met with, "Yeah I get my name from the Chevrolet Nova / 'cuz I came to run you ova." Not too bad a punch, if I do say so myself.
2- The freeform nature of rap drew me in and I began writing almost immediately.  I owe most of my language skills to trying to write raps.  Oh, I sucked in the beginning, but I could still do the horrorcore style over-the-top violence with enough blood and guts to make a mark on online forums.  Since we only had our rap names, no info, some even thought I was black, which I took as a compliment.  I wrote constantly, ending up with 45-bar-a-verse "songs," trying to hone my craft.  I still do this from time to time, only I have a lot more to do now.
2-Addendum- Turkish rap wasn't a thing back then. We only had the West Berlin school, with the crew Cartel whom had taken the style of music and given it a mother tongue spin.  Most rappers belonging to that tradition, as well as those who were trying to build the genre from the ground up would come to prominence in the upcoming years, but then, Eminem was all the rage.