Fifty one years ago, a band called King Crimson brought out an album called In The Court of the Crimson King. If you liked it, some considered you a bit of an oddball. It was called “progressive.’ It’s contents were clearly influenced by substances which weren’t legal then and aren’t now.
The “biggest’ track on it, was 21st Century Schizoid Man.
What were the lyrics like?
Well, like this:
Cat’s foot iron claw
Neurosurgeons scream for more
At paranoia’s poison door
Twenty first century schizoid man
Blood rack, barbed wire
Politicians’ funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire
Twenty first century schizoid man
Death seed blind man’s greed
Poets starving, children bleed
Nothing he’s got he really needs
Twenty first century schizoid man
Heady stuff.
Not the kind of thing your mammy and daddy wanted you singing along to when you were 15 or 16.
The band’s drummer Michael Giles, asked to explain the lyrics, said: “The song’s words “were a stark, black, bleak warning for people to wake up to the sheer ignorance, arrogance, greed, and stupidity of human behaviour.”
So where are those lyrics now?
Advertising a Ford Puma car for feck’s sake.
Is nothing irreligious and unsacred anymore?
Paddy's World 