This Day in Music History: King Crimson/Discipline (09/22)

Discipline is the eighth studio album by the band King Crimson, released on this day in 1981. This album was King Crimson's first album following a seven-year hiatus. Only founder Robert Fripp and later addition Bill Bruford remained from previous incarnations. The rest of the band was Adrian Belew and Tony Levin. The album resulted in a more updated 1980s new wave sound primarily resembling Talking Heads (with David Byrne style lyrics and vocals), with minimalistic funk-jazz-rock.

Song notes:

"Matte Kudasai" literally means "please wait". The original release of Discipline featured only one version of "Matte Kudasai", with a guitar part by Robert Fripp that was removed from the track on a subsequent release of the album. The latest versions of the album to be released contains both versions of the song – track 3, "Matte Kudasai", without Robert Fripp's original guitar part; and track 8, "Matte Kudasai (alternative version)", with the guitar part included.

The lyrics of "Indiscipline" were based on a letter written to Adrian Belew by his then-wife Margaret, concerning a sculpture that she had made.

"Thela Hun Ginjeet" is an anagram of "heat in the jungle". While the track was being recorded for the Discipline album, Adrian Belew, walking around London with a tape recorder looking for inspiration, was harassed first by a gang and then by the police. On returning to the studio, he gave a distraught account to his bandmates of what had just happened to him. This account was recorded by Fripp without Belew's knowledge, and is featured on the track.

"The Sheltering Sky" is named after and partially inspired by the 1949 novel of the same name by Paul Bowles. Bowles is often associated with the Beat generation, which would be an inspiration for King Crimson's subsequent studio album Beat.

The back cover features the statement, "Discipline is never an end in itself, only a means to an end". The album reached #45 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart.

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