Discipline

The artist Margaret Belew sent a letter to her husband describing the total immersion and creative agony she felt around her latest painting. She told him about the hours she had devoted; the strange mind games she played to maintain a sense of objective distance; the ultimate, inevitable loss of all perspective. Things were looking good as she neared completion, and her words hinted at an incoming wave of hard-earned fulfillment. But one line rings a little louder than the rest: “I wish you were here to see it.”

By the early 1980s, Adrian Belew was in demand as a touring guitarist, the kind of work that keeps you perpetually employed and inspired but also in transit. Wiry and smirking and virtuosic, he made his name keeping up with the hairpin idiosyncrasy of Frank Zappa during his most commercially successful era, the alien glow of David Bowie on his fantastic late-’70s voyages, and the Talking Heads as they became a nervy, flickering signpost for the sound of the young decade. Always serving the music and never repeating himself, Belew was enjoying an improbable ascent for a guy who once deferred his musical ambition to play drums in a lounge act at the Holiday Inn because at least he knew the checks would come on time.

Back in those days, the Kentucky-born musician would trudge back home after his shifts, numbed by the repetitive work, and listen to the mind-expanding sound of King Crimson to remind himself what real art could do. A lot of people joined Belew in this activity during the formative progressive rock band’s brief existence. From the paranoid Mellotron orchestras of their 1969 debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, to the hard-edged nightmares of their swan song, 1974’s Red, Robert Fripp led Crimson not as a rock band but as “a way of doing things,” ensuring that no two records would follow the same path and allowing him to swap bandmates, shift genres, and ultimately, abandon the project just as it appeared on the verge of a major breakthrough.

This is partially why, for the first time since his days at the Holiday Inn, Belew felt a tinge of insecurity when called to front a new band with Fripp in 1981. “I thought everything I was doing was a load of crap,” he explained. “I couldn’t write songs and I began to feel maybe I wasn’t a singer.” As described in Margaret’s letter, these crises of confidence are part of any artist’s journey toward self-gratification. But since his pioneering work with Crimson, Fripp had taken interest in some new influences that were esoteric even for him—particularly Indonesian gamelan music, where emphasis falls on the collective as a group of musicians perform the same melodies at the same time on percussion instruments.

By this point, Fripp was well-known for his cerebral nature. He was the intimidating, discerning professor, the kind who even the kids he flunked had to respect. (One interviewer noted how Fripp would request their word count so that he could parse out his answers accordingly.) But this new direction arrived from his own creative crisis. Since ending King Crimson in fall 1974, he had been through a number of transformations: retiring from the industry, studying at J. G. Bennett’s International Academy for Continuous Education, getting really into “Fourth Way” mystic philosopher George Gurdjieff, and eventually returning to music with a heightened focus.

This journey led to some of the objectively coolest music of the era—like his work with Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno—and some of the objectively least cool—like the League of Crafty Guitarists, in which a bunch of guitar students, dressed exactly like him, tested out his picking exercises in unison while perched in cult-like formation. (It’s worth watching.) Now based in New York, Fripp was energized by the younger music scenes rising around him—the same ones driving his peers in prog rock to obsolescence by comparison—and felt a need to shift his approach.

“I simply woke up at 8 o’clock and jumped out of bed because, when one has these little flashes, you can’t sit about with them,” he would later reflect on the epiphany that drove what he referred to as his “drive to 1981.” The revelation was this: I don’t play music. Music plays me. It sounds like a hippie mantra. But consider it from the perspective of the begrudging founder of a progressive rock institution who would settle for nothing less than total reinvention with each record. “We’re so busy rushing around the streets with all of this, we fail to notice that our friend music is knocking on the door,” he explained.

The group of musicians Fripp assembled in 1981 were meant to launch his next big creative project. There was drummer Bill Bruford, the only remaining member from previous iterations of Crimson. On bass he invited Tony Levin, a natural-born collaborator as proficient in melodic soft-rock as wonky jazz fusion. And then there was Belew, enlisted to help bring Fripp’s new guitar sound to life, picking together in intricate rhythmic patterns, like the trick where someone lays their hand on the table and stabs a knife between their fingers at increasingly rapid speeds. (Imagine two people doing this simultaneously, their hands interlinked.)

At first, the band was called Discipline to reflect Fripp’s larger philosophical motivation. A note on the back cover of the finished album reads, “Discipline is never an end in itself; only a means to an end.” But as the band gathered material, it became clear this group was another steady evolution of Fripp’s most famous collective. Though it was just a name, it was a loaded decision: Since they’d been away, prog had garnered new connotations as music for fusty old British dudes, a backlash that Fripp had foreseen. As more visceral, streamlined genres attracted the youth, he was quick to assert that he had always felt more of a kinship with the new generation. By releasing new music as King Crimson, he gave himself a chance to, once again, redefine the parameters of his work.

The triumph of Discipline is on how many criteria it succeeds. Like Genesis on Duke, the members of King Crimson had upgraded their equipment for a new era, assuring that, not only could no one else play like them, few could even identify the instruments. Bruford played primarily on electronic drums, and Levin introduced an instrument called the Chapman Stick, a 10-string slab of wood that allowed his playing to sound like flamenco guitar filtered through chorus pedals. This hyperactive rhythm section allowed Belew and Fripp to expand the definition of lead guitarists. At various points, Belew mimics the sounds of seagulls and elephants; Fripp finds a balance between new age serenity and proto-prog metal riffage.

Unlike Genesis on Duke, King Crimson could not write anything resembling pop music—a challenge they would continue to present themselves throughout the decade—but they did embrace new ways of making their music pop. Like Yes on 90125, they embraced the decade’s sense of overstimulation and hyperactivity with aid from producer Rhett Davies. Sometimes this meant sampling a conversation about crime on the streets—a slice of studio vérité in “Thela Hun Ginjeet” captures Belew exasperatedly telling his bandmates about being mugged—and other times it’s baked into the songwriting itself: “Frame by Frame” is an oblong, polyrhythmic kind of anthem, as intricately composed as anything from the band’s early days while also sounding like it could somehow fit in an episode of Miami Vice.

The clearest inspiration is Talking Heads: strained and neurotic and pulsing as if trying to rush through a more traditional set of music while the fire alarm is going off. Belew would carve out his own idiom within this framework, but you can hear him exploring the template to find his voice. The opening “Elephant Talk” is remarkable for the music alone: Levin’s woozy Chapman riff could lead a funk song if transposed to a major key. The way Fripp filters his solo through a synthesizer could make you think your record is warped. And to lead the song, Belew goes letter-by-letter listing synonyms for “conversation,” momentarily recusing himself from the task of writing intelligent lyrics and acknowledging the tedium with a grin that bursts through his delivery. (“These are words with a D this time,” he nudges, in case we didn’t notice.)

It sounds like music-nerd humor—and it is. But it marks an important update for this era of King Crimson. They could laugh at themselves. Gone were the days of elaborate concepts, old-timey characters, and aspirations toward modern classical composition. Credit perhaps goes to Belew’s fellowship with Zappa, or Fripp’s growing resistance to being pegged as some humorless tyrant. “You know, I spend more time thinking about dessert than I do thinking about the ramifications of the industry,” he reminded a journalist at Creem. “Chocolate cake at Un Deux Trois, actually, is currently on my mind.”

If there was room for dessert, so too was there room for romance, and one of the first songs completed for Discipline is also its most beautiful. Fripp had shared with Belew a new chord progression—a little bluesy, a little Beatlesy, first used in his solo song called “North Star” from his guest-filled 1981 solo album Exposure. He enlisted Daryl Hall to lead that version of the rendition, who accompanied its lazy groove with a kind of fragmented lullaby. Belew heard something more pained: He took inspiration from his Japanese-to-English translation book—the title is “Matte Kudesai,” or “Please Wait”—and closed his eyes to serenade a lover somewhere far away. “She sleeps in a chair,” he sings, “in her sad America.”

“Matte Kudesai” was the first single from Discipline, which makes sense: It is maybe the only Crimson song that could be played at a wedding, and it’s the closest thing to the era’s analogous ballads from fellow prog bands trying to evolve gracefully. Even within Crimson, it marked a kind of breakthrough: the moment when Belew regained his confidence writing songs, contributing guitar parts, and leading a band. As he glides over the scenery, high up on the fretboard with a slide to summon a beachside caw, he finds a way to guide his bandmates to new territory: sounds like a vacation, feels like home.

“Matte Kudesai” was not a hit, and Discipline did not do for Crimson what Duke or 90125 did for Genesis or Yes. Maybe it could have if more of the record followed in this spirit, with its otherworldly tenderness and openness to singalong melody. Instead, Discipline is restless and uneasy, pushing the boundaries of what a Crimson song can be. The instrumental closers, “The Sheltering Sky” and “Discipline,” remain dazzling for their intensity: the former with its sci-fi ambience and churning Bruford rhythms, the latter by transporting the heaviness of Red to a pristine studio environment that still feels futuristic. (There is a reason why the following decade’s rock bands, from Nirvana to Tool, would cite Crimson as a crucial influence.)

But the greatest breakthrough of Discipline was a creative one. Did it live up to Fripp’s vision of a band played by its music? In a sense. His ambition was to craft records in which it was impossible to distinguish which musician played which part, what instrument conjured what sound. This was partially what drew him to gamelan: “The natural product of our particular culture is the star system,” he said in 1982. “You couldn’t conceivably have stars within gamelan.” In response to the “so-called industrial capitalist culture” Fripp saw around him, he posited this new iteration of Crimson as a kind of utopia: Everyone had a crucial role in the songwriting, everyone got paid equally, and no one member led the band. Even more than the studio records from this lineup—there would be two more, 1982’s Beat and 1984’s Three of a Perfect Pair, with slightly diminishing returns—I hear this approach in the live recordings, when this material really came alive and performing it became second nature.

It makes sense—Discipline, after all, is only a means to an end. This is perhaps why, when it came time for Belew to add a spoken-word vocal part to a mind-bendingly complicated rhythmic instrumental, his thoughts turned to a letter his wife had sent him on the road. Every artist knows the struggle of maintaining a healthy balance between your work, your ego, and your ambition. Everyone aspires to the level of confidence that quiets the fear of failure, impervious to what an audience might think. By writing a song that—even if you just want to tap your foot to it—refuses to go with the flow, shifting between moods and volumes and rhythmic patterns, the band shows us what a work in progress feels like, with no end in sight.

The defining quality of “Indiscipline” is that it never finds resolution. It creeps and lurches and lashes out; it begs for your attention and retreats just as soon as you start following its logic. To fit the words of Margaret’s letter to music, Belew removed all references that would identify the subject (“Most people think it’s about a Rubik Cube or whatever that thing is called,” he joked at the time) and added his own Byrne-esque fits of neurosis to break up the narrative: “I repeat myself when under stress,” he says, calmly, four-and-a-half times. And then there’s that line about wishing you were here to see it, which leaps from his throat like a cry for help.

On a recent tour where Belew and Levin regrouped to perform Crimson’s ’80s material under the name Beat—with Steve Vai filling in for Fripp and Tool’s Danny Carey filling in for Bruford—the clearest takeaway was how much this music belongs to Belew, despite Fripp’s intention for a leaderless collective. All this time later, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone delivering such wildly complicated material so fluidly, and with such a big smile on his face. In concert, the band extends “Indiscipline” to roughly double the length of the studio version, and the words that once existed between two married artists coming to terms with their processes become a communal experience, delivered not just by the beaming virtuoso on stage but also among an audience of thousands, who at some point in the preceding decades, heard a part of themselves in its knotted, confusing twist of emotions. Together they brace themselves for the final line, which for all the preceding tantrums and spirals, could not be misinterpreted or challenged. “I like it,” Belew shouts, and the audience applauds.