![king crimson court king crimson court](https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5dc05342d8e09f00087f62d6/2:1/w_1000/kingcrimson.jpg)
The song is full of allegories and metaphors. It is like one of those medieval paintings of the plague, where skeletons dance and the suffering of the plague looks like a merry jig. The reason why the world is so horrible is because we are just dancing to the tune of the devil. “The rusted chains of prison moon are shattered by the sun” meaning his moonchild fantasy is disrupted as he enters a new dawn of understanding and figures out what is happening. In the Court of the Crimson King is the capstone to it all. He is forever lonely, confused about how the world can be so cruel. The moonchild is waiting for a sunchild but obviously they will never meet. But he believes that human connection is now impossible. He retreats into a fantasy escapism because the world is too horrible to face. Moonchild is harder to fit in, but I think it is about further loneliness. It is "run by fools", "the wall on which the prophet wrote is cracking at the seams" (religion is failing) and the man doesn’t understand why nobody else is worried? Doesn’t anyone get how bad it is? He will die confused about the lack of compassion in humans, "confusion is my epitaph". It’s like talking to the wind.Įpitaph is the man falling into total despair, believing that the entire world is doomed and cruel. I Talk to the Wind is the man trying to find comfort in god, but he gets no response. He believes that world will just get worse with more wars. Schizoid Man is about a man that is freaking out about human cruelty, especially the Vietnam war. I don’t know how much support this has but this is what I hear: I’ve always interpreted the album as one story. I knew nothing about Frederick II before I stumbled my way through this whole site, but it's a fascinating read, endorsed by Sinfield himself.įor what it's worth I don't think it's important to look at any of these records as being about a specific historic event/person, but this read of it traces a nice emotional arc through the first four albums about the inherent conflict of progress and change. The website also furthers goes on to state that all four first King Crimson albums follow the path of this character, which first seems absolutely insane but eventually became more and more compelling to me as I read along. This website posits that the Crimson King is based on Frederick II, a Roman Emperor who is often mythologized as the first "Modern Man" - he was frequently at war with the papacy and was particularly invested in science and the arts.
#King crimson court series
HOWEVER – if you want to read an extremely thorough and concrete reading of all of Sinfield's lyrics for King Crimson you can find a comprehensive and bugnuts series of essays hosted on his own website but written by someone else: If the song is written from the perspective of the "Crimson King" (which I think is open to interpretation) it matches with his depiction on the inside cover as a far more tragic and sympathetic figure than one might expect. Personally, I think this song is less concerned with explicitly "modern" concerns like Schizoid Man and Epitaph and is connected to those two more thematically than literally. Every colorful medieval trapping the song refers to is immediately followed up by an acknowledgement of failure or disappointment. I've always interpreted it more generally as being about the failing days of the "Crimson King's Empire" – whatever you want that to be a metaphor for.