This morning, news broke that Crazy Town frontman Shifty Shellshock had been found dead in his home. He was 49 years old.
Shifty found fame with Crazy Town at the turn of the century through their megahit "Butterfly" in 2000. Built around a sample of the Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Pretty Little Ditty", the song thrust the group into the spotlight, and along with it brought the ire of music press, who saw them as symptomatic of the nu metal excess that maligned the genre as it reached its commercial peak. Pressure mounted on them to provide a successful follow up to "Butterfly" but instead the group released Darkhorse, which was a commercial flop and hastened the end of the band for a decade before their return with The Brimstone Sluggers in 2015.
However, I have long maintained that Crazy Town received a lot more backlash than they deserved for their music output and even published a defence of Darkhorse back in 2017. They very much matched the pomp and bravado of peak Limp Bizkit in the early 2000s but never quite managed to shake off the image people had of them as trend followers driven by hedonism, which weren't helped by Shifty's chronic battle with drug addiction. After Epic Mazur's departure in 2017, the group, now known as Crazy Town X, released a series of singles but an album failed to materialise amid lineup instability and allegations of Shifty's relapse into drug abuse.
Earlier this year, Shifty had posted on social media about how he was now sober, after an unpleasant incident the year before which saw him get into a physical altercation with bandmate Bobby Reeves. He had appeared in several celebrity rehab reality shows during the 2000s and 2010s but the news of his sobriety had given fans hope that he was finally on the right track, so his sudden death has come as a real shock to the fans and community. No cause of death has been given.
Our thoughts are with Shifty's friends and family at this time.
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