King Crimson, Discipline

When I was in 11th grade I took my first course at Grinnell College, mostly because it was foreordained for insufferable faculty-brat whelps like myself who thought themselves the shit and perceived a dearth of any real challenge to their advanced perspicacity in the public school curriculum. I stupidly chose Humanities 101, also known as The Hardest Class Ever Up To That Point In My Life. Accustomed as I was to my high school English classes allowing four weeks for the study of To Kill A Mockingbird, the syllabus pretty much caused my brain to shit itself. The professor was a reputed hardass even by college standards, the sort that gave everyone bad grades on their first papers so we'd all have ample room for improvement. I wanted to rise to the challenge, though, so I spent that winter reading the Iliad and the The Odyssey, along with The History Of The Peloponesian War, Plato�s Apology and The Symposium, Aristotle�s Poetics, and the obligatory Oedipus Rex, among other things. Some (most) of these texts I have not touched since, so it�s telling to realize how much of them I still remember. I guess my brain done worked pretty good, once.

That winter I spent most nights in Burling Library in one of the ridiculously cozy study carrels, reading line after line of Homeric verse that was alternately fascinating and impenetrable. My soundtrack for most of these study sessions was King Crimson�s Discipline, which is appropriate insofar as it�s a cacaphony of dualities: an academic veneer surrounding a visceral core, complex arrangements using austere instrumentation, a brash yet controlled sonic assault. The studied minimalism of �The Sheltering Sky� was an ideal backdrop for those interminable evenings of supposed intellectual benefit, coupled as it was by January�s early nightfall and deep freeze. The nearly impossible counterrhythms of the album�s eponymous track�one guitar line in 17/8, the other in 15�flow together improbably to create a compelling, even funky groove. This is how I began idolizing the Ultimate Rhythm Section that Bill Bruford and Tony Levin comprised; this is how I committed myself to learning every drum part, if it took all year. Well, it did take a year, more than a year, but I did it. I tried to emulate Bill Bruford in every respect, and then some. I tuned my shitty drums like his and held my sticks like he did. I tracked down a transcription of �Discipline��s impossible drum part and tried to transcribe some of the other songs myself. I quoted the album�s lyrics in emails to girls, for Christ�s sake. I drove my friends crazy by talking endlessly about how awesome this album was, how these four guys with such prodigious talent made it sound so effortless.

Discipline's album sleeve bears one of Robert Fripp's pithy, pseudophilosophical aphorisms: �Discipline is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.� This could be translated, in the context of this music, to read: �Instrumental wankery doesn�t amount to shit if it isn�t going somewhere.� King Crimson�s ethos, at least back then, was not to cause conniptions with their odd time signatures; it was to make listeners forget that they were hearing odd time signatures and just relax and enjoy the music. One can easily ignore the fact that �Frame By Frame� is in seven, or how many different subdivisions are straddled by the groove in �Thela Hun Gingeet�. When Fripp strafes a song with arpeggiated 32nd notes, it's more meditative than offensive. Unlike so many other prog and jam band juggernauts, they did not want to overstay their welcome or sully anyone�s carpet with intricate arrangements and expansive soundscapes. This is thinking person�s pop music, but it�s not that far from the dancing person�s pop music; it's not so different from, say, the Talking Heads, with whom at least two Crimson members collaborated at one time or another. I mean, if a seventeen-year-old version of myself could get his feeble head around the Oresteia, certainly a casual listener could dig �Elephant Talk�.

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