King Crimson: Discipline

KING CRIMSON: DISCIPLINE (1981)

1) Elephant Talk; 2) Frame By Frame; 3) Matte Kudasai; 4) Indiscipline; 5) Thela Hun Ginjeet; 6) The Sheltering Sky; 7) Discipline.

General verdict: The one record that forever broke the wall between Apollonian and Dionysian.

We have no real reason to believe that it was first and foremost for the sake of extra publicity that Fripp decided to reinstate the name «King Crimson» for a band that had, for several months, sported the name «Discipline» — consisting of himself, Adrian Belew on lead vocals and second guitar, Tony Levin on bass and highly intimidating Chapman stick, and old pal Bill Bruford on regular drums, whacko drums, and pseudo-drums. In fact, «Discipline», eventually relegated to the title and title track of the album, was a perfect name for this new team; I suppose that the main reason for brushing the dust off the King Crimson moniker was that, once the going really got good, Robert understood that he would not be averse to spending a lot of time with those guys — five years, as it turned out, which was much longer than any previous incarnation of KC anyway — and wherever Robert's heart is at the moment, you'll find King Crimson.

Discipline was recorded in mid-1981, and if there is a single base reference point for the album, it is clear enough — Talking Heads. Fripp had plenty of time to watch and interact with the band (and occasionally even play on their records) during his New York period, not to mention being good friends with Brian Eno, who produced their best albums; and Adrian Belew, one of the hottest session players at the time after having worked with Zappa and Bowie, had also paid his dues to the Heads by playing on Remain In Light and accompanying the band on their sub­sequent tour. Like his friend Peter Gabriel, another successful survivor from a previous epoch, Fripp astutely understood where precisely the heart of the artistic future (present?) of rock music was concealed at the moment; and although he spent a bit too much time waiting before reaching out for it — too much to have his name added to the honorary roster of New Wave Pioneers — he did have the advantage of wisdom, planning, and, well, discipline to ensure that the new produc­tion of King Crimson could not be dismissed as cheaply derivative bandwagon-jumping. (Of course, people who «professionally» hate progressive rock while extolling the virtues of New Wave may still feel free to dismiss that production as cheaply derivative bandwagon-jumping, but for the sake of simplicity we will put them in the same group here with Holocaust deniers and flat Earth theory supporters).

So, what is Discipline? A simplistic, but not entirely incorrect, answer would be — seek the average between Larks' Tongues In Aspic and Fear Of Music, and you will be as close to Discipline as possible. In this new avatar of King Crimson, most of the traces of the 1973-74 heaviness have been wiped out — most, but not all, since brutal riffage and thoroughly distorted guitar still play an important role on tracks such as ʽIndisciplineʼ. What has been retained, however, is the «math-rockish» aspect, with complex chord patterns mechanically played in unusual time signatures — but instead of the bluesy and jazzy basis of the past, Fripp and Belew are now more frequently working with heavily syncopated, choppy, funky rhythms that they took right out of the David Byrne / Jerry Harrison textbook; indeed, I am fairly sure that the main reason why Fripp added a second guitarist to the line-up was his impression of those two guys and their interlocking, tightly woven rhythmic patterns — along with a sort of «surely I can do better!» reaction to the relative (relative!) lack of «discipline» in these patterns.

Indeed, upon first hearing a track like ʽElephant Talkʼ, it is easy to decide that it would have perfectly fit in on Fear Of Music. The same kind of paranoid funk; the same type of impression where two guitars and one bass sound like three frightened, scurrying insects running in circles; the same kind of mildly psychotic, babbling, perturbed vocalist who spends more time shouting and hiccuping than actually singing. But there is a reason why Fear Of Music went twice as high in the charts as Discipline: the new King Crimson's approach is much more complex, and though the songs superficially sound danceable, trying to properly dance to them will most likely result in the gravest of injuries. David Byrne actually does sound like an unfortunate victim of modern society when he delves into his alleged phobias on record; Belew and Fripp prefer to make wise­cracking commentary on that society. And even then, Talking Heads songs always have meaning: with King Crimson, you have to work in order to convince yourself that they do.

In a subtle way, there is a third element in these tracks, one that we kept missing on classic KC albums and certainly could never imagine on Talking Heads ones — a subtle, barely perceivable presence of the spirit of Giles, Giles & Fripp. I have always refused to believe that the presence of an «elephant» on Cheerful Insanity (ʽThe Elephant Songʼ) and here (ʽElephant Talkʼ) was pure coincidence, because ʽElephant Talkʼ softly reverts us to the humorous (British?) absurdity of 1968 (never mind that much of the absurdity is provided by an American this time around). As Adrian shouts out lengthy foreign words from dictionaries in a rally-like style, concluding each outburst with a reproachful "it's only talk!", the guitars clash with each other and with the rhythm section in busy, fussy, flurry-roaming fashion, creating the atmosphere of pointless, but still never ending urban commotion... with the image of an «elephant», represented both by the final scorn­ful reference to "elephant talk" and those crazy guitar effects Belew does that really sound like a bigass elephant in heat, towering over all the "brouhaha, boulderdash and ballyhoo". When you really put your mind to it, it is impossible not to see a little bit of that condescending Pythonesque eccentricity that puts the icing on the cake — but also, perhaps, at the same time alienates large bunches of listeners for whom it is much easier to identify with the closer-to-home Byrne sound.

However, ʽElephant Talkʼ is also an exception in that it is the only track on the album that strives to be openly amusing. A great benefit of Discipline is that it actually covers a lot of emotional ground — at their best, King Crimson are never above stirring up the most base human feelings, even if they constantly search for really weird ways to do that. ʽFrame By Frameʼ, if it were an instrumental, would be just a thematic variation on ʽDisciplineʼ (the track); Belew's vocal part gives it a tragical face, even if the lyrics do not specify precisely the nature of the tragedy (one interpretation is that lines like "death by numbers in your own analysis" are his subtle criticism of Fripp's way-too-calculated approach to music making). And ʽMatte Kudasaiʼ, featuring one of the most heavenly slide guitar tones ever captured on tape, is an almost surprisingly accessible ballad, one that you could easily expect on some adventurous country-western album.

Where it all comes together is on ʽThela Hun Ginjeetʼ, to me, still the quintessential early Eighties KC track (although, like almost everything else on here, it became even more impressive live on stage: I almost always listen to the Absent Lovers version instead of this one). Faster and tighter than the rest of them, this anagram for ʽHeat In The Jungleʼ is like a symbolic musical representation of the hustle-and-bustle of modern society — live, Fripp is typically sitting in his chair, mechanically weaving the mother thread riff like an unperturbed, unchangeable Moira, while Belew is frantically running around, throwing off guitar firecrackers and engaging in all sorts of sonic craziness, yet in the end inevitably coming full circle and adding muscular, choppy, scratchy funk support to Fripp's more intricate spinning wheel. On top of this urban madness, we have Fripp overdubbing surreptitiously recorded pieces of Belew's account of how he was accos­ted by gangs and the police in a seedy spot in London, adding to the overall confusion and para­noia. This is the one track of theirs that probably would have felt right at home on Fear Of Music, but chances are most people won't even notice all the symbolic aspects of it because they will be too busy headbanging to the awesome groove. Look no further than ʽThela Hun Ginjeetʼ, though, if you are looking for a piece of music that can be 100% equally assuaging for the mind and the body — admirable as a mixture of mathematical order and improvisational chaos, and at the same time totally stimulating in a "let's go crazy" kind of way.

In the end, however, Fripp gets the upper hand. The title track, admired by some and totally incomprehensible to others, is the distilled and refined essence of this mark of King Crimson: an exercise in coordinated musical complexity that, I imagine, would be tough to beat even today. The amazing achievement of King Crimson is that somehow, in some totally incomprehensible manner, they manage to make this complexity alive and kicking. Perhaps it is the fact that, all of the time, Bruford plays the simplest drum pattern of them all (a pitiful 17/16 next to the 4/4 of the bass drum); more likely, it is because the exercise has a carefully planned and effective build-up, because, apart from all the different time signatures, we also have intelligently prepared shifts of speed and pitch — as the guitarists gradually «warm up» and their imaginary circuit boards start blinking on-and-off like crazy, it is as if those pulses start sending direct signals to specific neurons in your brain, establishing brief one-on-one connections; give in to the effect and this almost literally becomes a violent brainfuck (so I'd actually be cautious about recommending the track to anybody with psychological problems). In any case, ʽDisciplineʼ appeals to my own little inner demons far more than, say, just about anything on Trout Mask Replica — or, if we wind the tape in the opposite direction, far more than any given track by Tool — through a mix of its internal logic and its calm, restrained, but grimly determined playing style.

The album is not note-for-note perfect: one serious misstep, for instance, is ʽThe Sheltering Skyʼ, a nice, but unexceptional, atmospheric piece, slightly New Agey in essence, that for some reason turns out to be the longest track on the album. For anybody else, it could be a career highlight, but in the overall context of Discipline, it has the function of a relaxation piece, a chance to let you catch your breath after the hustle and bustle of ʽThela Hun Ginjeetʼ, and little else. While I have nothing against this, the more-than-eight-minute length bothers me — allegedly, the track was originally terraformed as an improvisation during the band's first rehearsals, which explains the length formally, but the result is that much of it sounds meandering, an accusation that cannot be directed towards any other composition here. Then again, I guess no King Crimson album is ever complete without a bit of meandering (from ʽMoonchildʼ down to ʽProvidenceʼ, we must have played them all), so this had to be expected. But, if you ask me, it is no big surprise that the track pretty much vanished from the live setlist after the 1981-82 tours, and is the only number from Discipline not to be featured (in a generally superior version) on Absent Lovers.

Minor quibbles aside, Discipline is a real mother of a landmark. It introduces a trilogy of records that is arguably the single best example of an old-time progressive rock act creatively adapting to the radically new standards of intelligent music making — in some ways, it might even be thought of as a triumphant culmination of the New Wave movement, summarizing most of its structural and textural achievements and closing the book on it, doing this so firmly, in fact, that no subsequent lineup of King Crimson could be comparable to this one in terms of image trans­formation. An important part of it is also that Discipline reaffirmed, almost to the point of fetish­izing, the role of complex playing technique — where classic New Wave, growing out of the punk movement, still protested against the superfluous complexities of the prog era, Fripp, Belew, Levin, and Bruford showed the world how it was perfectly possible to pacify and merge those two opposites, playing virtuoso-style while at the same time retaining all the, let's say, «body enter­tainment value» of New Wave music.

Of course, it didn't quite work that way in terms of popularity. The new look KC never became a huge commercial act (not that this was ever a part of the original plan), and it is not often that you find Discipline or any of its follow-ups in top critical lists on the «100 best New Wave albums» and suchlike. For all the transformations, Fripp and his brethren remained too brainy (and, per­haps, also too dragged down by their dinosauric reputation) to become major critical darlings in the pop press — the best they could achieve is an aura of polite reverence, where, if you talk about Fripp, you tend to do it politely, but better not to talk about Fripp too much in the first place. But if we make an effort and judge these guys exclusively based on the music, and not on the ability to create a publicity vortex, then Discipline is quite unquestionably going to be in the top five or so records released in 1981. (Fortunately, that is precisely its current status on the RYM listing). And, for that matter, if this is as close as the band ever got to «pure» math-rock (though nobody really knows what pure math-rock is), then it should be the best math-rock album ever made, period. (Studio album, that is: one should always keep in mind that live King Crimson after the transformation is nearly always preferable to studio King Crimson).