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How a US Vice President inspired an essential King Crimson song
King Crimson are widely lauded as the pioneers of prog-rock, hailed as the men who put intelligence into rock music and helped it do something truly interesting. The genre turned the tide at a time when the psychedelic movement had gotten too ahead of itself, losing sight of the original brilliance it once had in a cloud of drugs and egotism.
A truly cerebral outfit, no matter what criticisms fired at the Robert Fripp-led band, and the rest of prog-rock for that matter, their 1969 track ’21st Century Schizoid Man’ is a bonafide classic. With its varying dynamics, roaring saxophone, and flecks of free jazz that were directly inspired by the work of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the song created a sound that is so unique that even 53 years after its release it remains genuinely astounding.
We still hear the influence of ’21st Century Schizoid Man’ alive and well today, be it in the frenetic music of Black Midi or in the works of some of the most respected jazz-oriented musicians of today, such as Yussef Dayes. The track was the progenitor of many of the most challenging but captivating moments in contemporary music, and for this reason, it will continue to be discussed for a very long time.
A purely innovative cut, the unsettling sound was achieved by over-gaining the vocals through the mixing console and through varying the equalizer on each hit of the high-hat — a reflection of the genius that the band espoused, using fairly simple techniques to create something refreshing.
Speaking of the song’s highlight, the guitar solo, Fripp told Total Guitar in 1974: “It’s all picked down-up. The basis of the picking technique is to strike down on the on-beat and up on the off-beat. Then one must learn to reverse that. I’ll generally use a downstroke on the down-beat except where I wish to accent a phrase in a particular way or create a certain kind of tension by confusing accents, in which case I might begin a run on the upstroke.”
Whilst we could wax lyrical about the music of ’21st Century Schizoid Man’, one of its other defining features is the political angle of the lyrics. The song criticises the deadly Vietnam War with the line, “Politicians’ funeral pyre / Innocence raped with napalm fire”, as well as mentioning the “death seed”, Agent Orange, that brings about the “harvest of bad things” in the South East Asian country.
Although the song is broadly directed to the incumbent American government of the time, led by the controversial President Richard Nixon, before a live rendition of the song on December 14th, 1969, Fripp sarcastically revealed the identity of who it was written about. He said that ’21st Century Schizoid Man’ was dedicated to “an American political personality whom we all know and love dearly. His name is Spiro Agnew.”
The 39th Vice President of the United States – and Nixon’s second in command – Agnew was a favourite of the American right for his law and order rhetoric, but the counterculture and those of the younger generation hated him, both for his Conservatism and for the many gaffes he made when in office. Once described as the ‘John the Baptist’ of America’s right, his fall from grace was stark and a story all should read.
