Discipline
by King Crimson

I saw Adrian Belew play a bar in Iowa City in...had to be...1981 or 82. So, he had been on Sheik Yerbouti, Remain In Light, this album which everybody seemed to love...and there were maybe 300 people there, and he was playing with a recorded rhythm track so when we got him to do an encore, he just played the first two songs on the tape again. He said, "Who here remembers their first acid trip?" and we whooped and hollered. Amazingly small-time performance for a guy who could play arenas with three different world-class bands at the time.

His vocals and his whole personality just transformed what King Crimson was capable of--Americanized the whole operation, and for the good.

This album was completely on trend at the time, with the talky prose poem over music like Laurie Anderson etc, the Talking Heads-style funk on the opening track, the anagram song title like Eno had done, this was working out iterations of ideas that were in the air at the time. But Fripp was working out his own ideas musically, and his output in these years was very diverse, from his Frippertronics stuff to the album with Daryl Hall and the League of Gentlemen album.

He had done the spiritual study with JG Bennett, and he was coming out with all this diverse product, plus the alternate tuning, and pretty soon he started giving holistic guitar clinics to...anybody who wanted to sign up. Every interview he gave was like words from an oracle, and every album was an important statement. Discipline, for the crowd I was hanging with, was a monolithic, landmark album, we didn't so much listen to it as study it. Stands up pretty well after all these years. (Edited)

It's the most underrated and underappreciated album of its time. Once again, King Crimson draws the blueprint for about a half dozen subgenres of music with a mammoth release that takes a few cutting-edge musical ideas and runs with them. 1969's ITCOTCK forged a new genre out of The Moody Blues and Pink Floyd; 1981's Discipline forged a new genre out of Talking Heads, David Bowie, and The Police. It could very well feature some of the best musicianship and the most creative songwriting on any rock album, regardless of subgenre.

It's a very busy album which leaves me feeling almost breathless after side 2 concludes. Not an album to put on if you want to relax. I get the references to Talking Heads and it works. What I like about King Crimson is that every album sounds like a different band and this is no exception. When I am in the right mood I really enjoy this, however, personally I prefer the jazzier offerings like Lizard. (Edited)

From marklg 05/11/2017 10:50 | #190624 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

I repeat myself when under stress I repeat myself when under stress I repeat myself when under stress I repeat myself when under stress I repeat myself when under stres, I repeat!

From mrslacker 06/03/2015 02:57 | #142902 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

My mom says I need more of this, but I'm not sure she's talking about the album...