It was, quite simply, a sound that shook the music world. When King Crimson emerged from the dust of the considerably more oblique and largely absurd trio of Giles, Giles and Fripp—whose one release, The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp (Deram, 1968), was aptly titled—nobody could have anticipated that this group would literally change the face of the pop world, and almost single-handedly define a new musical genre: progressive rock. Crimson co-founder/guitarist Robert Fripp has, with a number of subsequent incarnations of Crimson, only partly been successful in distancing his flagship group from that stylistic marker, but in many ways it matters not. As labels become increasingly meaningless, revisiting this seminal album reveals far more than any reductionist categorization can.
