If Zack De La Rocha were here, he’d be scratching his head. The whole sports metal phenomenon, arguably started by his band, now finds itself at an impasse. After all, if Mvtley Cr|e‘s [a]Tommy Lee[/a] can make a decent, ahem, fist of the rap/rock crossover with Methods Of Mayhem, where does that leave us?
In trouble, that’s where. Which brings us to Crazy Town. They at least seem to have better credentials than most – rappers Shifty Shellshock and Epic Mazur once worked with cerebral Def Jammers 3rd Bass, and they claim to have attended the same school as Ice Cube – but their vision of LA is very different from his.
Looking like a classic Sunset Strip idea of punks, these rock gonks – just one step up the evolutionary ladder from wearing spandex – have songs like ‘Hollywood Babylon’ that are less incitements to riot and more thinly disguised attempts to join Mr Pamela Anderson in the VIP enclosure at the Viper Rooms. The single ‘Toxic’ tries to act heavy and ghetto-toughened, but just ends up sounding hilarious. Their snarled belligerence would barely trouble a chess club, while their slothful beats don’t so much jump around as roll uncomfortably under the sledgehammer guitar onslaught.
“We’re taking hip-hop to a whole new level”, Shifty barks during ‘B-Boy 2000’. Wildly delusional he might be, but for once he’s right. Sadly, that direction is downward.