Butterfly

'Butterfly' was released on October 24, 2000, the third single from Crazy Town's debut album The Gift of Game — and it was nothing like the rest of the record. Where the album leaned on bratty rap-rock, 'Butterfly' drifted: a dreamy guitar figure sampled from 'Pretty Little Ditty,' a track from Red Hot Chili Peppers' 1989 album Mother's Milk. The borrow was so load-bearing that Anthony Kiedis, Flea, John Frusciante, and Chad Smith all carry writing credits on it. Over that loop, frontman Shifty Shellshock (Seth Binzer) and Epic Mazur (Bret Mazur) rapped a fully sincere love song.

It detonated. 'Butterfly' hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for two nonconsecutive weeks in March and April 2001 and topped the charts in eight more countries — Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Switzerland. For one spring, the tattooed guys from the nu-metal shelf had the biggest love song in the world.

There was no second act. Nothing else Crazy Town released came close, and in 2009 Billboard ranked 'Butterfly' number three on its chart of the decade's one-hit wonders — a status the song wears comfortably: it was always a fluke of chemistry, one loop and one hook meeting at the exact moment rap-rock was willing to slow-dance. Binzer spent the following years publicly fighting addiction, including stints on Celebrity Rehab, and died of an accidental overdose on June 24, 2024, at 49 — which has only made the song's three weightless minutes land softer, a butterfly preserved from a heavier scene.