from the LP In the Court of the Crimson King, Atlantic Records, 1969Epic on a level that most bands wouldn’t dare to approach, even by today’s standards, this first song on King Crimson’s debut album was as terrifying and boundary-shattering an introduction to the world as it gets---when a song written in 1969 can still elicit dropped jaws and shocked eyes forty years later, due to both the insane jazz-rock and visceral poetic lyrics, you’ve got a winner! The imagery, matched with the heaviness of the main riff, remains nightmarish to say the least, “…cats foot, iron claw, neuro-surgeons scream for more, at paranoia’s poison door…blood rack, barbed wire, polititian’s funeral pyre, innocents raped with napalm fire…” Having now reached the actual 21st century, there has still yet to be as potent a musical summation of our postmodern condition as this, in my humble opinion.
