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Forever No. 1: Crazy Town’s ‘Butterfly’
Following the death of Shifty Shellshock, Billboard looks at Crazy Town's Hot 100-topping smash "Butterfly" and how it was able to reach No. 1.
From the mid-’90s peak of Rage Against the Machine and instruments-era Beastie Boys through the late-’90s takeover of KoRn and Limp Bizkit and the eventually diamond-certified breakthrough of Linkin Park’s 2000 debut LP Hybrid Theory, bands mixing loud guitars with aggressive rhymes and copious record-scratching grew into a truly massive piece of the music industry. Especially because its source is at once both incredibly obvious (a mostly shirtless bunch of SoCal rap-rockers finding kinship with an RHCP track, duh) and remarkably obscure: The percolating bass, weightless guitars and rising-sun horns of “Butterfly” are looped not from one of the Chili Peppers’ hits, but from a pre-crossover 1989 deep cut called “Pretty Little Ditty,” a disorientingly gorgeous four-measure pattern that briefly materializes mid-song and disappears for good immediately after. However, with the heavenly sample elevating Shellshock’s sealed-with-a-kiss mash note lyrics — and a perfect accompanying visual in the lush, pleasantly psychedelic music video, co-starring his eventual wife Melissa Clark — “Butterfly” flapped higher than even any RHCP hit.
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