It’s an epic composition that rages at the gods without becoming overwrought, a poignant updating of Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth for the Vietnam era. There were also passages of real emotional depth, and Epitaph is a prime example. King Crimson’s debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, wasn’t just a scorched-earth assault on the traditional blues rock order. Most importantly, it shows an appreciation of what makes music exciting rather than merely impressive. King Crimson’s signature tune to this day, 21st Century Schizoid Man captures all their defining qualities: non-rock instrumentation used in inventive and powerful ways, technical proficiency harnessed for dramatic effects, striking imagery sparingly deployed. The crunching verse/chorus is astonishing, but there’s also that swinging instrumental break in the middle, its rapid accelerations and sudden stops an exercise in gleeful precision that leaves the listener giddy and disorientated.
If proof were needed that the utopian gestures of the late 60s had been trampled into the dirt, then this was it: a synapse-blasting onslaught of boundary-wrecking jazz rock, somehow both austere and strangely groovy. An opening fanfare of imperial brass and shrieking guitar cuts to a harsh one-chord riff, over which a robotically distorted Greg Lake delivers the immortal lines: “Cat’s foot, iron claw / Neurosurgeons scream for more / At paranoia’s poison door / Twenty-first century schizoid man!” Contemporary ears might have started to adjust to heavier sounds thanks to the likes of Hendrix and Cream, but this was something else.
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