Best One-Hit Wonders of the Decade: 2001

Editor's Note: First, let me lay down some ground rules. When I say "best," I don't mean these are my favorite songs or even that they're of the highest quality (though at times both of those things may be true, the opposite is probably true). Rather, these songs represent the "one-hit wonder" concept better than any other released that year. In other words, these songs came out of nowhere, became massive hits and the artists faded into obscurity. In most cases, these songs are still with us, having taken on a life of their own, with the artist in some cases entirely forgotten. We will discuss the song, the song's legacy and where the band is now. Also included at the bottom are links to some of the "runner up" one-hit wonders.

Crazy Town - "Butterfly" (Columbia Records, February 2001; from the album The Gift of Game, 1999)

What can I possibly say about LA-based rap-rockers Crazy Town that hasn't already said by anyone who has ever laid eyes on the band members (and has a decent sense of humor)? What can I say about their hit "Butterfly" that hasn't been run into the ground by the likes of Hal Sparks or Mo Rocca on VH1's umpteenth talking head list program? The answer is probably nothing, but that's never stopped me before.

According to Wikipedia, Crazy Town (who are listed in the genres of "Rapcore," "nu metal" and alternative rock, hip-hop and metal) formed in 1995 after "Epic" (Christian name Bret Mazur) and "Shifty Shellshock" (Seth Binzer) began collaborating on music, but the band did not become "serious"(clearly the Wiki writers got a little loose with the adjectives) about making a go for the big time until several years later. By the late '90s, the duo had recruited a bunch of other dudes who had gelled hair and a truly unnecessary amount of tribal tattoos, christened them with ridiculous, nonsensical names like "SQRL" and "Faydoedeelay", and finagled a record contract out of Columbia Records bosses. By Thanksgiving 1999, the group's album, The Gift of Game, was on the shelves of every Sam Goody and Camelot in every galleria in the country. Unfortunately for Shifty and the gang, the album was nothing special. Another faceless attempt at rap-metal, cashing in on the success of superior (but still shitty) bands like Limp Bizkit and Korn and ignoring anything that might make either of those bands special. The band got a spot on the 2000 Ozzfest tour which allowed Mr. Shellshock to express himself artistically by cracking open a case of Natty Light, greasing himself up, showing off his pecs and Chinese letter tattoos to hoardes of flabby white men in black t-shirts, and pretending to be a rock star. However, this pretending got him into some hot water with the powers that be (most likely Sharon "I'm a horrible person" Osbourne). Shellshock was thrown off the tour two weeks in after doing what he no doubt assumed was simply his rockstar duty--throwing furniture through a glass window.*

Now, I have to side with Señor Shellshock on this one (this is a rant, so skip to the next full paragraph if you don't want to take the scenic route). If you're in a metal band, and you're on a tour named for a man who once tried to impress Nikki Sixx by snorting a line of ants up his nose, and your band is called Crazy Town, it seems like a logical conclusion to assume that, people want you to drink like an asshole and then act like a chemically unbalanced rockstar, even if you're just a chemically unbalanced dude. It worked for Axl Rose, right? It worked for Keith fucking Moon and at least three members of Led Zeppelin, right? Ben Franklin did it. That's historical permission to get wasted and be a prick. Okay, so you could maybe argue that Percy Shellyshock should have waited until his band was headlining Ozzfest, or at least their own tour, before putting a chaise lounge through the French doors, but these are merely details--details a student rockstar cannot be bothered with when all that stands between him and complete rockstar freedom is a couple of inches of glass. So the guy isn't quite Axl--do you think Axl became Axl overnight? No! It took practice; years of pro-bono work smacking around normal girls and freaking out at concerts in dive bars before graduating to supermodels and stadiums. Throwing a chair out a window is Rock Star 101. No one was injured. This isn't Advanced Rockstar Fuckery where you smack photogs, get the cops called on you by your supermodel girlfriend, and incite riots in Canadian provinces. So screw you, Sharon Osbourne, or whoever kicked them off the tour--take a look at yourselves! People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones--they should throw chairs (or something? bear with me; this made sense in my head). And who knows? Maybe the chair really needed to go out the goddamn window.

MOVING ON. Crazy Town's brand of hip-hop-inspired "nu metal" came during the death rattle of the "rap-rock" genre: Limp Bizkit monkey man guitarist Wes Borland departed his band in order to devote his attention to his Ween-inspired band, Big Dumb Face. The likes of Kid Rock had begun to explore other genres like uninspired country-rock, and while nu metal bands like Korn continued to flourish thanks to a strong fanbase, and Johnny-come-latelys Linkin Park managed inexplicably to find success, the salad days of the genre were mostly over and the mainstream tide had begun to turn away from rap-metal. Fans were growing up and either turning their attention to lesser known metal bands, hip-hop acts, or exploring other burgeoning genres like the neo-garage rock scene spearheaded by The White Stripes and The Strokes.

So how did Crazy Town still manage to hit? Easy. Their song had absolutely nothing to do with nu metal. Sure, the guys looked like nu metal guys in their video, but they were playing what was essentially a dance song, just like a few years earlier when Sugar Ray had looked like hard rock guys (and considered themselves as such), but were playing beach music.

"Butterfly" was unleashed on an unsuspecting public in February 2001, almost two full years after the band had released their album. Clearly, someone at the record company was determined to squeeze a hit out of an album that had been sitting on shelves for 18+ months. Why this happened, we may never know, but this is my theory:

There was a lowly A&R manager at Columbia Records who just couldn't catch a break. Maybe he'd spent all his time pushing indie bands and getting nowhere, and his bosses told him he better have a hit band, or he'd soon be collecting unemployment. Desperate, the manager spent a sleepless night at the office, sifting through hundreds of already released songs on his first generation iPod, looking for a hit. Just when he was ready to give up, "Butterfly" played. At first he took no notice of the song, as it was by a band that had two DOA singles ("Toxic" and "Darkside") and an album that had stalled after selling 100,000 copies. But, as he listened to the song, (which is nothing more than a guy rapping over a 5-second sample of John Frusciante's guitar part on Red Hot Chili Peppers' instrumental "Pretty Little Ditty" from 1989's Mother's Milk) he realized, not unlike the creators of the atomic bomb, that what he was listening to had potential; the type of potential that, if exposed to humans, could harm, maim, and maybe kill millions. The A&R guy knew what he had to do. He immediately destroyed his iPod and all copies of the song he could find and, after a few hours of having "yo' my buttafly/suga, baby" stuck in his head, went home and shot the jukebox in his head (read: he killed himself). But he made one mistake: he wrote down the name of the song and artist on a Post-It note. The next morning, an even lowlier intern was clearing out the now deceased A&R guy's desk and came upon the Post-It note reading: "Crazytown (sic) - Butterfly." Within 48 hours, the intern had devliered the song to top execs, who then released the song to radio stations and Tower Records as a single. A video soon followed. When the song hit #1 on the Billboards in 15 countries and sales of The Gift of Game surpassed 1.5 million, the intern was promoted to A&R executive status and made millions of dollars, spent it all on Patrón, cocaine and a McMansion in the Hollywood Hills, joined the Church of Scientology, banged Willa Ford for two weeks, and lost it all when he put all his money and effort behind Nick Lachey's solo career. He now spends his days wandering around Silverlake, filthy, his eyes crazed, and wearing nothing but a sandwich board sign on his shoulders that reads (side 1) "What hath God wrought?" and (side 2) "Butterfly".

This video is presented without comment, but honestly, flying tattoos? What the hell?

A follow up single, "Revolving Door," enjoyed predictably poor results on the charts, but it didn't matter; the damage had been done.

*This also marked the departure of the band's DJ, DJ AM aka Adam Goldstein, who would later become famous for a) spinning at parties thrown by Kate Hudson and other minor celebs, b) boning both Nicole Richie and Mandy Moore, c) barely surviving a plane crash with Travis from Blink 182, and d) dying of a drug overdose in August 2009, two days after the reformation of Crazy Town (I don't say that to be a jerk, but his death really did make him known to people like my mom). Goldstein actually quit the band twice: once quitting after the first Ozzfest incident, only to return after the success of "Butterfly", and leaving once again before the recording of the second album. Inexplicably, Goldstein was actually the second former member of Crazy Town to die after "Rust Epique" aka Charles Lopez, the original guitarist who had left the band for a solo career while The Gift of Game was still being mixed and died of a heart attack in 2004. I'm not going to say there's some sort of curse on Crazy Town, because that Shifty Shellshock guy is still alive despite the best efforts of Dr. Drew and Andy Dick.

Charts: As previously mentioned, the song went to #1 in 15 countries and hit #1 for two consecutive weeks on two different charts (Hot 100 and Modern Rock).

Legacy: What, you mean besides having made one of the most annoying songs of the decade? Possibly ever? Or the fact that they basically gave anyone who is anti-sampling a beyond perfect example of how mind-numbing, repetitive and just plain uncreative sampling can be? Well, there was that great scene in Jake Kasdan's Orange County where the main character (played by Colin Hanks) realizes that the people at Stanford parties are just as horrible as the people at his school, illustrated by a scene of college girls dancing to, you guessed it, "Butterfly".

Where Are They Now? Besides DJ AM, Shifty Shellshock aka Seth Binzer is the only member that anyone remembers or has seen since 2001. After the band's follow-up album, 2002's Darkhorse, failed to deliver another "Butterfly" (which I realize is sort of like saying, "after the US failed to deliver another Hiroshima"), the band broke up. Also in 2002, Binzer guested on Paul Oakenfold's "Starry Eyed Surprise" single, which basically just sounded like another bad Crazy Town song, though 33% less annoying. In 2004, only a year after the band's break up, Binzer released a solo album (as Shifty Shellshock), Happy Love Sick.

2008 saw Binzer joining the cast of VH1's Celebrity Rehab and later Sober House, a celeb-reality show hosted by Dr. Drew about celebrities supposedly in the final stages of treatment, attempting to kick their habits for good. Binzer is best remembered for a relapse in which he disappeared from the premises and posted bizarre videos to his MySpace that gave his housemates (which included Andy Dick) clues as to his whereabouts. Binzer, who was addicted to crack cocaine and an alcoholic, was so good at being sober (or at least, so entertaining at being not sober), that he appeared on Sober House 2.

In 2007, someone played a sick joke on Crazy Town and told them it might be a good idea to reunite (I suspect Ashton Kutcher, though only Sascha Baron Cohen would have the balls to do something so politically charged and sick). It was announced in 2008 that they would be working on a new album, Crazy Town Is Back. According to Wikipedia, the album has been delayed (translation: Obama stepped in).

In August 2009, Crazy Town regrouped for a one-off show at Les Deux in Hollywood.




Runners-Up:

Afroman - Because I Got High

Willa Ford - I Wanna Be Bad

Alien Ant Farm - Smooth Criminal (Michael Jackson cover)

The Flys - "She's So Huge"

This is a painful post for me, as it makes me confront the past--specifically my past with one Katie Holmes.

You see, the Orange County, CA-based band The Flys (not to be confused with a '70s New Wave band of the same name) got their start on the soundtrack to Disturbing Behavior, a terrible Stepford Wives rip-off co-starring Holmes and James Marsden released during the post-Scream teen-horror resurgence. On a list of awful teen horror movies of the late-'90s, it would probably be somewhere below The Faculty and slightly above Idle Hands. (The film's tagline: "Perfection is every teenage student's co-pilot." What the hell? I fail to remember planes being involved in any way.)

"Got You Where I Want You" appeared on the soundtrack album released sometime in mid-summer 1998. But this may not be the song you associate with that film; another one-hit wonder, Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta," was used in the ad campaign.

The song was coupled with a tie-in video for the movie featuring Holmes and Marsden running away from the brainwashed teens chasing them, only to come to a cliff where the couple stops, and watch as their peers jump like lemmings, falling to their watery deaths--while the band plays smack dab in the middle of all of this. I recall the first time I watched this video, it was included on a CD-Rom on The Flys album, which a friend had. This friend and I had bonded over our mutual love for Ms. Holmes during an after-school intramural soccer game. We watched the video on his computer in a cramped corner of his dorm room, enraptured for all four minutes.

(BEGIN TANGENT -- warning: this part is barely related to the rest of the post, feel free to skip): Now here's where I reveal something to you, dear readers. I feel we have become close over the past few months and I can share this with you: From about 1998 to 2002, I was obsessed with Katie Holmes. These are also the years I happened to attend an all boys boarding school, but that is no excuse. I won't lie, it was creepy. From the moment I'd seen her in a Fall TV preview issue of Entertainment Weekly promoting Dawson's Creek, I had fallen head over heels. That hair, the eyes, those lips always curling into that sideways smile and her weird, shaky eye problem. I had a lame poster of her wearing a hat that I'd found at Media Play tacked on my dorm room door. I bought every issue of YM or Seventeen that featured her on the cover. I made a teacher take me and my roommate to see Go (far superior to Behavior, btw). I had my mom record most episodes of Dawson's, as my dorm only had one TV that was usually commandeered come Wednesday night. I had The Ice Storm on tape, simply for the several scenes she appears in (and maybe somewhat for Christina Ricci). It was getting uncomfortably weird.

So when I saw the video for "Got You Where I Want You" with Katie looking ravishing, all touseled hair and questionable eye makeup, what should have just been an enjoyable Nirvana rip-off became my new favorite song. (END TANGENT)

The band, led by brothers Adam (vocals) and Joshua Paskowitz (rapper), had an interesting sound--grunge was an obvious influence, but The Flys weren't wallowing in the Northeast rain, they were riding convertibles, and, as their album cover attests, jumping out of planes under the California sun. They had too much fun to be miserable--they glammed it up and weren't afraid to reveal their melody. My favorite part--the bridge's rap--was cut out of the radio version for reasons I'm still not sure of. It still holds up today, albeit in a nostalgic sort of way. The often copied Pixies/Nirvana loud/soft dynamic is put to good use here. After the single reached #5 on the Modern Rock Charts, the band's album, Holiday Man, only went to #109 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart.

They released a second single called "She's So Huge" that wasn't given any sort of video treatment, and definitely not one with Ms. Katie Holmes. Again, we have another possible example of a label giving up on a band they'd already deemed a one-hit wonder. The song is a piece of bouncy, distorted pop-rock. The sound isn't very original maybe, but it's no more generic than a ton of other So. Cal bands that came out in the late '90s, and their influences are probably better--there's a lot of Faith No More going on here. And of course, it's catchy--though we've seen thus far that a catchy sound isn't grounds for a hit song.

One thing I am not going to sit here and defend is the lyrics, which are laughably bad. Sample lyric: "I'm your food/am i cake?/I'll have another plate of attitude." Jesus H.

I can't hit you with anymore or you'll just be saddened that this sort of thing could pass on a major label. Okay, one more: "she's so huge/she's so cool/so damn sweet/her perfume's cheaper than her eyes are blue." What? This may eclipse Limp Bizkit's "Nookie" as the worst lyrics in a '90s single--luckily, the vocals are all distorted and you can't understand a damn thing Paskowitz is saying.

The Flys issued another album two years later, 2000's Outta My Way. The album wasn't a disaster--reviews were fairly positive, saying that the songs revealed even more disparate influences and a knack for melding pop hooks with hard rock riffs.

In 2002, they went on indefinite hiatus, but six years later, The Flys announced on their MySpace page saying simply, "The Flys Are Back." To celebrate their comeback, the group released a new iTunes single--a cover of "Hey Jude" as well as a cover of their own song, "Got You Where I Want You 2008," clearly a nod to Alannah Myles. As of yet, no new material has surfaced nor has there been mention of a new album, but the single (available on their MySpace) is surprisingly good. The new version of 'Got You" holds up to the original, and in some ways improves on it--pianos and acoustic guitars buoy an overall mellower sound and shows that the band has become more comfortable with letting melody take center stage and not drowning it in compression and distortion that was so popular over the last decade. And the "Hey Jude" cover isn't embarrassing--which is all an unnecessary Beatles cover really needs to be. These guys may be living proof that just because you're a one-hit wonder doesn't mean you're a complete joke.


Oh, and about me and Katie Holmes. Yeah, well. We all know what happened there. After movies like Abandoned, Wonder Boys, The Gift (her best, ahem, acting to date) and Batman Begins, I realized she just wasn't very good and it began to bug me. Batman and Katie Holmes together should have been a perfect storm of awesomeness for me, and it just wasn't. She came perilously close to ruining the movie. I also thought she was kind of lame for dating the appallingly uncharismatic Chris Klein for five years. So my interest started to wane. Eventually I just stopped following her altogether.

What's she up to these days anyways? Anyone?

Oh, right.

Download: The Flys - Got You Where I Want You
Download: The Flys - She's So Huge