“Cigarettes, ice cream, figurines of the Virgin Mary”
Genres: progressive rock, symphonic rock, new wave, experimental, ambient, hard rock
Recording decades: 1960s - 2000s
Classic Lineup:
Robert Fripp - guitar
Everyone else
Quintessential album: Red and Discipline
Favorite album: Larks' Tongues in Aspic
If prog really represents the ultimate refinement in rock music, then King Crimson is the entity at the very top of that ivory tower.
Guitarist and only constant member Robert Fripp insists that King Crimson is not a band, but “a way of doing things”, a statement that ceases to sound pretentious once you've digested a few of their albums. See, although the album liner notes will list the composers of a given track, very very few of those tracks actually sound like they've come from within a person. King Crimson, to put it a bit dramatically, feels like a concept without a self– it's as if the music already existed from the start, and all Fripp and his revolving door of subjects ever did was provide a conduit between the music and the rest of us.
So, then, what does the music sound like? Well, that depends greatly on the period: whereas the early years saw mainly medieval, classical, and jazz influences on the burgeoning heavy-psych scene, the rock element eventually came to the fore by the mid-70s. It was then that Fripp dissolved the band until 1981, when it reemerged as a new wave-flavored outfit playing complex math-rock polyrhythms for a few years. Then, in 1994, that iteration merged with both the heavy metal and ambient movements to bring adjacent Tool fans into the fold as well. Though they no longer record, all the surviving members are very much involved with the spirit of Crimson in some way even now. “You're gonna carry that weight a long time”, indeed.
Well…I guess that still doesn't answer the question as to what makes King Crimson, King Crimson. What sets them apart from the rest of prog? Maybe it's easier to come at this from the other way and acknowledge what they are not.
While Genesis often had a humanistic and personal element to their music, KC remained academic. Where Yes embarked on meticulously composed fantastical jaunts, Crimson preferred to incorporate free improvisation into their catalog and allow the listener to make their own sense of it later. While Rush had a social message to convey, Fripp and Co. took a more “art for art’s sake” approach and left their few outward statements cryptic and vague. Camel may have presented their music as if they expected us to marvel at it, but KC never did. If there's no self, then there's no one to expect marveling, you know?
Not that there's no marveling to be done, though– in fact, it's just about all you'll ever do when these albums are on. This band exudes hyper-professionalism to such an extent that the aforementioned evaporation of the Self seems an inevitability. This is not the music of Man, any more than gravity is a law of Man– all we mortals can do is observe and demonstrate these larger phenomena the best we can.
Yet, despite all the eye-rolling I'm sure to invite with these lofty claims, I'll not tolerate anyone calling Crim pretentious, because 95% of the time, they walk the walk and then some, and the other 5% is usually relegated to live experiments that they knew enough to not repeat.
Predictably, though, even if we reject the accusations of pretentiousness, the thing many may still accuse King Crimson of is sterility, of prizing form above substance, to such an extent that we are meant to appreciate the exquisite architecture and structure of a song as opposed to the way it makes us feel. That's not to say that the music lacks feeling, but the feeling is an arm's length away, as if locked within a photocopy of a Renaissance painting. That is, all the colors are shown in the right places, but the imperfection, the human touch, of the individual brushstrokes is lost. I've also heard a couple of people express frustration at the “wandering” nature of King Crimson, and this is a valid criticism, especially in the incredibly indulgent jazz jams of the early 70s and the atonal avant-garde weirdness of the 90s. “This is a dangerous place”, as Adrian Belew once warned us, and it's decidedly not for everyone.
But, let's face it: if the idea of music that sounds much more like an academic paper than a confessional diary doesn't appeal to you, then you're probably looking at the wrong genre entirely.
Discography:
In the Court of the Crimson King
Red
Beat
Three of a Perfect Pair
THRAK
The ConstruKction of Light
The Power to Believe
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