title: 21st Century Schizoid Man
text: "21st Century Schizoid Man" is a song by the progressive rock band King Crimson from their 1969 debut album In the Court of the Crimson King. Often regarded as the group's signature song, it has been described by sources such as Rolling Stone as "a seven-and-a-half-minute statement of purpose: rock power, jazz spontaneity, and classical precision harnessed in the service of a common aim."
  
  Lyrical content
  The lyrics of "21st Century Schizoid Man" were written by Peter Sinfield and consist chiefly of disconnected phrases which present a series of images. All three verses follow a set pattern in presenting these images. The song criticizes the Vietnam War with the lyrics "Politicians' funeral pyre/Innocence raped with napalm fire". The line "Cat's foot, iron claw" is a reference to the French fable The Monkey and the Cat, while "death seed" in the final verse alludes to what Sinfield calls the "harvest of bad things" brought about by Agent Orange. The second line is a single image, often more specific than the first two, and the third line approaches an actual sentence. The fourth and last line of each verse is the song's title.
  
  Before a live performance of the song on 15 December 1969, heard on the live album Epitaph, Robert Fripp remarked that the song was dedicated to "an American political personality whom we all know and love dearly. His name is Spiro Agnew."
  
  Musical structure
  Clocking at nearly seven and a half minutes, the song is notable for its heavily distorted vocals, sung by Greg Lake, and its instrumental middle section, called "Mirrors". Most of the song is in either 4/4 or 6/4 time, save for the end of the song, which culminates in two bursts of noisy, abstract free jazz inspired by Duke Ellington Orchestra. Fripp explained his guitar solo to Guitar Player magazine in 1974: "It's all picked down-up. The basis of the picking technique is to strike down on the on-beat and up on the off-beat. Then one must learn to reverse that. I'll generally use a downstroke on the down-beat except where I wish to accent a phrase in a particular way or create a certain kind of tension by confusing accents, in which case I might begin a run on the upstroke." The song encompasses the heavy metal, industrial, jazz-rock and progressive rock genres, and is considered to be an influence on the development of progressive metal. The dissonant and almost atonal solo, was rated number 82 in Guitar Worlds list of the Top 100 Greatest Guitar Solos in 2008. Louder Sound ranked the solo at No. 56 in its "100 greatest guitar solos in rock" poll.
  
  Personnel
   Greg Lake – bass, lead vocals
   Ian McDonald – alto saxophone
   Robert Fripp – electric guitar
   Michael Giles – drums
   Peter Sinfield – lyrics
  
  Sampling
  Kanye West sampled the song on "Power", from his 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. In a 2022 lawsuit by Declan Colgan Music Ltd, the owners of the mechanical licence for the song, they claimed that West had sampled it without a licence.
  
  See also
   List of anti-war songs
  
  References
  
  Notes
  
  King Crimson songs
  1969 songs
  Songs of the Vietnam War
  Songs with lyrics by Peter Sinfield
  Songs written by Robert Fripp
  Songs written by Greg Lake
  Songs written by Ian McDonald (musician)
  Songs written by Michael Giles
  Song recordings produced by Greg Lake
  Island Records singles
  Atlantic Records singles
  1976 singles
  Jazz fusion songs
  British heavy metal songs
  Song recordings produced by Ian McDonald (musician)
  Progressive metal songs
  British progressive rock songs