Back in 2007, I penned a slavishly overwritten paean to the infernal majesty of King Crimson’s signature piece, “21st Century Schizoid Man,” in the wake of a debate I’d waged at my then place of employment, i.e. MTV News Online, about the Crimbos’ indelible influence on what would become heavy metal. Then as now, I maintain that if you can’t hear the, to my mind, UNMISSABLE similarities between “Schizoid” and Black Sabbath’s epic “War Pigs,” you’ve clearly got your head completely up your own ass, but I digress.
News came down, this week, that King Crimson maestro Robert Fripp, an incomparable musician and notably difficult character that also played on seminal albums with David Bowie, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, John Paul Jones, David Sylvian, Andy Summers, Blondie, Talking Heads and even fuckin’ Daryl Hall, has recently suffered a heart attack, resulting in two separate surgeries and a stay in intensive care. As recounted in this story in Rolling Stone, the famously iron-willed Fripp being who he is, he still managed to play a scheduled gig, afterwards.
As I mentioned back on that post from 2007, I’ve been a fan of Fripp and Crimson’s wide body of work ever since first discovering them in college, so news of the great man’s brush with mortality – and this after already losing names this year like Rick Buckler of the Jam, David Johansen of the New York Dolls, Brian James of The Damned, Al Barile of SSD, Dave Allen of Gang of Four, Clem Burke of Blondie, David Thomas of Pere Ubu and Mike Peters of The Alarm (and I’m probably forgetting someone) – found me reverently rediscovering the myriad joys of Fripp’s robust oeuvre, which led me to the curious video below.
With audio culled from a recording of “21st Century Schizoid Man” captured at London’s fabled Marquee club in 1969, a YouTuber named Samuel S. appended some fancifully rudimentary animation that looks like a fittingly head-warping amalgam of Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” gang and Episode 8 of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.”
Enjoy.
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