Why did Robert Fripp dedicate a song to the disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew?
The 1960s were an interesting time for the world. While the beginning of the decade welcomed new music, The Beatles, and essentially kicked down the post-war barricades, giving people a chance to enjoy life once again, the end of the decade was laced with war, bloodshed, and political controversy.
Let’s first focus on the former, which is the more positive part of the decade. The Beatles had started releasing music in the UK and were taking off, then by 1964, they had flown across the pond, and the American Invasion began. Once they played on The Ed Sullivan Show, suddenly, every musician in America wanted to perform in a band.
Steve Van Zandt remembers the moment they played. “It transformed America,” he said, “On February 8, there were no bands in America; on February 9 we had Ed Sullivan and on February 10, everybody had a band in their garage. It was literally overnight.”
With the sudden influx of bands, the ‘60s became a period of musical experimentation. Different effects were used in sound, which gave songs a varying tone, the style of bands shifted, and the attitude of people on stage also evolved. It was a real period of constant change in music that led to some of the most innovative developments in sound.
It also welcomed in narrative-driven music. Van Zandt discussed the folk movement in ’65, ushered by Bob Dylan, that stopped the hype of the British Invasion. “The floodgates opened until the summer of ’65,” he said, “When the Americans took the charts back with the folk rock of The Byrds and Bob Dylan.”
The years that followed meant that music became more experimental and more political. We had strange psychedelic sounds flooding the airwaves and protest songs that held a mirror up to the world and forced it to look. As such, by the end of the decade, when the war in Vietnam had escalated, trouble in the US grew, and Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew took office in the White House; it wasn’t long before music started to paint a political picture and be used as a point of protest.
Robert Fripp and King Crimson did this in their song ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’, one of the decade’s most unique-sounding tracks. Because of its unique sound, various bands and rappers have since sampled it. “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,” said Robert Fripp, discussing how he and his band managed to achieve the sound, “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.”
What’s even more interesting about the song, though, is the subject matter created by lyricist Peter Sinfield. “Schizoid” is a personality disorder that often means people have multiple personalities. When Robert Fripp was penning the lyrics, he took inspiration from the political climate at the time and, in doing so, dedicated the track to the untrustworthy Vice President in office. He said he wanted to dedicate the track to “An American political personality whom we all know and love dearly. His name is Spiro Agnew.”
Agnew resigned as Vice President in 1973 when he was found guilty of tax evasion. Given his controversial presidency, he had already come into some contention working under Nixon before his resignation. The song was a testament to his untrustworthy nature, and Fripp was keen on making that clear.
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