Among those bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s who blended elements of psychedelia, progressive rock, and heavy metal, one of the pre-eminent examples is King Crimson. Drawing on a recent intensive study of topicality in psychedelic popular musics (Echard 2017), this presentation will deploy musical topic theory to examine in detail two albums which bookend King Crimson's 1960s and 1970s work: In the Court of the Crimson King (1969), and Red (1974). It will consider the ways in which psychedelic topicality was preserved and transformed, both in the individual genres of progressive rock and metal, and in musics premised on the fusion of these. Particular theoretical concepts to be deployed, and elaborated upon as needed, are: the troping of topics, the historical sedimentation of topics, and the ways in which topicality contributes to both dynamic style change and to the stabilization of certain generic blends into longstanding formations. Topic theory, like other semiotic models more commonly deployed in popular music studies, is a congenial framework for this sort of investigation given its attention to both fine details of musical sound, and to broader critical questions arising from the historical and cultural situations in which music participates. In the literature of popular music studies overall, the project of mapping the topical universe of 1960s and 1970s rock music is well underway, but is also still very much in its early stages. This presentation aims to contribute both to the analytic discourse surrounding King Crimson in particular, and to the broader project of constructing a topical map of rock music more generally, with special emphasis on topics related to psychedelic, progressive rock, and metal subgenres.

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Work Cited:

Echard, William. 2017. Psychedelic Popular Music: A history through musical topic theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Keywords: King Crimson, topic theory, troping of topics, style change, genre fusion, progressive rock, heavy metal, psychedelic music