Crazy Town’s music and image reflected one of the most dynamic and volatile sociocultural environments on the planet — Los Angeles — where the urban squalor of the South Central district exists just minutes away from the glitz of Beverly Hills. Spearheaded by a team of producers/vocalists, Seth “Shifty Shellshock” Binzer and Bret “Epic” Mazur, Crazy Town combined hip-hop’s lyrical attitude and rhythmic sass with the muscle of live rock instrumentation. The combination yielded the group a number one hit in 2001, when “Butterfly” topped the Billboard 100 and helped push the band’s debut effort, The Gift of Game, to platinum status. While never quite recapturing the spark of that breakthrough, they released two subsequent sets in 2002 and 2015, with an EP landing in 2024.
Bret Mazur and Seth Binzer were both surrounded by music while growing up in Southern California. Mazur’s father was Billy Joel’s manager, while Binzer’s father was an artist and filmmaker who directed the Rolling Stones’ live movie Ladies & Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. Originally from New York, Mazur started crafting beats and cutting tracks at an early age and found himself working on records by MC Serch (of 3rd Bass), Eazy-E, and MC Lyte; he was also House of Pain’s DJ for a short period. Meanwhile, Binzer had come across a copy of the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill while in Mexico, and discovered a side of hip-hop that inspired him to start making demo recordings on his own.
Binzer and Mazur initially came together as the Brimstone Sluggers, and while the pair recorded plenty of music, their contributions to other hip-hoppers’ projects prevented them from completing a full album of their own. They also each ended up in rehabilitation clinics, where the two began writing letters that helped hatch the plan to form Crazy Town: a hip-hop band featuring a full instrumental lineup to complement the rapping vocalists. The group was to be rooted in classic rap-rock miscegenation like Run-D.M.C.’s “Rock Box,” or Public Enemy and Anthrax’s collaborative effort “Bring Tha Noize.”