Seth Binzer Dies: Lead Singer Of Crazy Town Was 49

Max Goldbart
·2-min read
Seth Binzer Dies: Lead Singer Of Crazy Town Was 49

Shifty Shellshock aka Seth Binzer, the lead singer of Crazy Town, whose 2000 song “Butterfly” became an anthem, died Monday. He was 49.

The Los Angeles Medical Examiner said he died Monday, but no cause of death was given.

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The nu-metal star founded American rap-rock group Crazy Town in 1995 in L.A. with Bret “Epic” Mazur.

The pair released tunes for several years until their late-1999 debut album, The Gift of Game, saw them explode onto the scene with its third single. “Butterfly” became one of the anthems of the 2000s, with its signature “come my lady” chorus refrain repeated at parties everywhere. Riding the rap-rock wave, it spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in early 2001 after topping the Modern Rock chart and reached No. 3 in the UK.

Watch the “Butterfly” video here:

The song, which sampled the Red Hot Chili Peppers instrumental “Pretty Little Ditty” and was the group’s only U.S. hit, played in the opening sequence of the 2003 Jack Nichloson-Diane Keaton movie Something’s Gotta Give. The band toured with Ozzfest in the early 2000s and appeared in the 2001 video for P. Diddy’s “Bad Boys for Life.”

The Gift of Game went platinum in the U.S. and reached the Top 10. It peaked at No. 15 in the UK, and a fourth single, “Revolving Door,” made the Top 25 there.

Crazy Town’s second album, 2002’s Darkhorse, failed to reach the same levels of popularity as the first. The group then went on hiatus before reforming in 2007. Its last album was 2015’s The Brimstone Sluggers, which failed to chart.

The group’s turntablist during its heyday was DJ AM, aka Adam Goldstein, who left in 2001. He went on to form TRV$DJAM with Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, and they were the only survivors of a 2008 plane crash that killed four others. He went on to perform with Jay-Z but died in 2009.

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They broke up soon after, although reformed and released a third album, The Brimstone Sluggers, in 2015. In 2017, Mazur left the band and Binzer changed the name of the band to Crazy Town X.

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