The Dusty Shelf: King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King

[The Dusty Shelf is a weekly column that showcases a tragically overlooked album from the music snob's library.]

Not all influential bands holds up to the test of time.  King Crimson is one of those bands.  But they are still worth mentioning here, if not for a song that spelled the birth of a whole subgenre of rock music.

Lots of old prog rock sounds pathetically Spinal Tapish to today’s audiences, and I believe that even one of the holy grails of progressive rock, In the Court of the Crimson King, has lost its shine completely.  King Crimson’s 1969 debut may have been beat out by Pink Floyd’s earliest, but it was this album that definitely declared the arrival of progressive rock as a musical force.  And most of that had to do with a remarkable opening track.

“21st Century Schizoid Man” remains possibly the purest, greatest prog rocker in history, opening with a swampy blues riff before cracking open into a supernova of jazz horns and drum rolls.  Before prog songwriting became stymied with Tolkien pomp, “Schizoid Man” is pure punk paranoia, with vocalist Greg Lake screaming breathless, “Blood rack barbed wire/Politicians funeral pyre/Innocents raped with napalm fire/Twenty-first century schizoid man“.  Not exactly “Bungle in the Jungle”, is it?

The rest of the disc isn’t completely dispensable, but it really drops in quality from there.  “I Talk to the Wind” is a cooling folk ballad and “Epitaph” has its moments, but it’s a bit too long, while the title track is filled with melodramatic cheese and “Moonchild”, a three minute song stuck in a 12-minute track space, is a complete waste of wax.

So why do I recommend it? I’ve never really been critical of an album I’ve written about on this column before, and frankly I debated including this one.  But in spite of its faults, it remains a landmark, and the opening track may be one of the only examples of a song that actually does warrant the price of the album on its own.  That, and the crazy-awesome album artwork.

Prog rock has not aged well in general, and King Crimson are one of time’s most unfortunately victims.  But its splendorous breadth is still there, and even if it makes you cringe at times, In the Court of the Crimson King really is the launch pad of an entire genre.  That’s gotta count for something.