Category: poetry

Droppings

A
plane
flies over a helpless people,
dropping

bombs

on

a

frightened, hungry, homeless, unarmed group of civilians.

A
plane
then flies over that helpless people,
dropping

rotten

food

to

dirty, starving civilians who are shot at when trying to get it.

A
plane
that does these things might as well be
dropping

shit

in

a

toilet, since that is how they look down on Gazans.

Analysis of ‘In the Wake of Poseidon’

I: Introduction

In the Wake of Poseidon is King Crimson‘s second studio album, released in 1970. It came into being during a period of great instability in the band, since founding members Ian McDonald (alto sax, flute, clarinet, Mellotron, vibraphone, and backing vocals) and drummer Michael Giles quit after the band’s American tour. To make matters worse, lead singer/bassist Greg Lake would also leave, during the recording sessions of Poseidon, to cofound ELP.

Though the album was well-received by critics upon its release, citing the execution and production quality as better than its predecessor, Poseidon has since been regarded as something of a mere copy of In the Court of the Crimson King. Indeed, apart from “Peace–A Beginning,” all the tracks from Side One of Poseidon are parallels of those on Side One of the first album. Furthermore, on Side Two of Poseidon, towards the end of “The Devil’s Triangle,” there’s a clip from the title track of the previous album, the “Ah…ah, ah-ah, ah, ah-ah” vocals.

Still, in spite of what would seem legitimate criticisms of this reworking of the first album in the way guitarist/leader Robert Fripp would have had it, I’ve always preferred Poseidon to Crimson King: I find this second album to be bolder and more colourful than the first (though I consider the lyrics of the first album to be preferable overall to the obscurantism of those of the second). In an attempt to rationalize this ‘redoing’ of the first album, I’d say that Poseidon can be seen as the ‘epitaph,’ if you will, of Crimson King, a kind of ‘lament’ over the demise of the great original lineup.

Here is a link to all the album’s lyrics, and here is a link to all the tracks from the album, including the shorter single version of “Cat Food,” “Groon” (the B-side of the “Cat Food” single), and Greg Lake’s guide-vocal version of “Cadence and Cascade”.

Apart from the links to the first album that I’ve noted above, the second album has other links to the original lineup. Giles was retained as a ‘guest drummer’ for Poseidon, and two of its tracks are based on music the original band played live: “Pictures of a City” is based on “A Man, a City,” and “The Devil’s Triangle” is based on “Mars,” an instrumental improvisation based in turn on “Mars, the Bringer of War,” from Gustav Holst‘s The Planets.

In fact, as noted above, Lake even recorded a ‘guide vocal’ for “Cadence and Cascade” in an uncharacteristically unexpressive voice; not to bad-mouth replacement singer Gordon Haskell for his excellent performance on the recording used on Poseidon, but if Lake was available to sing the track, why didn’t he do so with his usual expressivity, then Haskell could have debuted on bass and vocals for Lizard?

Many of the themes of the first album are repeated here on the second: the horrors of war, modern alienation, capitalism, political corruption, and fear of the end of the world. The theme of modern alienation is in abundant supply in “Pictures of a City,” this album’s counterpart to “21st Century Schizoid Man.”

But as a sharp contrast to all of this negativity, remaining original members Fripp and lyricist Peter Sinfield gave us a trilogy of tracks on the ideal of peace. Of course, this ideal can never be realized if the issues of the preceding paragraph are not dealt with, but it’s good to be reminded of peace as a goal worth striving for, on three occasions spread out over the course of the album.

II: Peace–A Beginning

“Peace–A Beginning” opens with heavy reverb that will die out slowly over the course of the short track. Lake is singing a cappella in C minor. The four-line verse he sings makes references, however indirectly, to the four elements: air (“the wind”), fire (“lit by the flame”), earth (“the mountain”), and water (“the ocean” and “the river”); these are all identified with a personified peace.

Such basic, fundamental elements point in the direction of unity and permanence, which is fitting, given that peace will “never end.” It’s also fitting that there are two references to water, rather than just one; one of these is the ocean, appropriate for an album called In the Wake of Poseidon, the title track of which will deal more with the four elements.

When Lake sings the last word, we can hear Fripp softly play four notes on his guitar: A, F-sharp, C, and A-sharp. Then we go into the next song.

III: Pictures of a City

Since this song is Poseidon‘s equivalent of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” it’s fitting that we hear saxophones in it, played by McDonald’s replacement, saxist/flautist Mel Collins. His jazzy playing of the saxes reinforces the contemporary urban feel of the song. The band is playing in G minor, in a kind of twelve-bar blues before the first verse.

Rather than present any kind of narrative, Sinfield just gives us a series of urban images, true to the title of the song, as well as the sounds of the city, and the feelings that result from such sights and sounds.

“Concrete” gives us a “cold face,” leaving us “stark sharp” and “glass eyed,” lacking expression. Such are the alienating effects of modern urban life: removed from nature, with the city’s polluted air, fire breathing out smoke from cars’ exhaust pipes, earth covered up and suffocated, if you will, under concrete, and water made filthy through sewage, we’re also disconnected from community. The contaminating of the four elements means there can be no peace.

There’s a considerable amount of internal rhyme and assonance in these verses: “face cased,” “stark sharp,” “bright light scream beam,” “neon wheel,” “spice ice dance chance,” “mouth dry tongue tied.”

The third line of the first verse vividly portrays the problems of driving in the big city: road rage, screeching brakes, the honking of horns, and car accidents. Never mind wars between nations–one often finds oneself in a kind of war just by driving in a busy city.

The white of “red white green white” suggests light, like that of the “neon wheel.” Note the red and green of traffic lights, fittingly mentioned right after the “brake and squeal” of impatient drivers. Note also the absence of the yellow traffic light: one hurries up and waits, but never drives slowly.

After the first verse, we return to the jazzy twelve-bar blues riff of the harmonized saxes and guitar. City life sure can give you the blues.

Much of the imagery of the second verse, especially its first line, suggests how urban alienation leads to a desperate attempt to connect with others by looking for love in all the wrong places: “Dream flesh love chase perfumed skin.” There are other “tinseled sin[s]” going on, though. There’s the “greased hand” of political corruption and bribery. One’s teeth one ought to hide so the people we’re cheating don’t know of one’s wicked motives. “Pasteboard time slot sweat and spin” suggests the daily grind of the nine-to-five job, or wage slavery under capitalism.

This verse ends with Fripp playing a chromatic ascension of high notes going up to A-sharp, which leads into “42nd at Treadmills,” the fast middle-section equivalent of “Mirrors,” from “21st Century Schizoid Man.” Since this song is about the immorality of the city, I can interpret “Treadmill” in terms of its old use as a punishment for prisoners in the UK and US of the 19th century, used to exert labour from them, an effective metaphor for wage slavery. “42nd” suggests a doubling of the evil of “21st” from the original song.

Like “Mirrors,” “42nd at Treadmill” is essentially in a 12-bar blues structure (a cycle of four bars of the tonic chord, two of the subdominant chord, two of the tonic again, two of the dominant chord, and two again of the tonic). In fact, much of this section is simply a sped-up version of the 12-bar blues riff heard before each of the first two verses.

After this comes a soft, slow variation on the 12-bar blues structure, suggesting the night time and everyone having gone to sleep…though since this song was initially inspired by New York City, ‘the city that never sleeps,’ during King Crimson’s American tour of late 1969 and early 1970, perhaps we should imagine people tossing and turning in their beds, especially at this section’s dissonant ending, which suggests the morning and therefore the need to wake up and face yet another grueling work day.

With the final verse, instead of getting images of city life, we get what is largely the effect of city life on its residents–the alienation, brokenness, and blindness of those without political or class consciousness. Blinded by drunkenness and aimless partying, these people can’t communicate or see their reality for what it is. They’re doomed in an industrialized, urban hell.

The song ends with that chromatic ascension of high notes on Fripp’s guitar, but this time ending on B and introducing a chaotic, dissonant ending like the one for “21st Century Schizoid Man,” though I find this one to be far darker, and therefore better, than the first one. Also, you can hear in this one Fripp’s signature screaming guitar phrases, in which he quickly strums dissonant, high-pitched chords like the splintery ones you hear on “Sailor’s Tale.”

IV: Cadence and Cascade

This song is Poseidon’s equivalent to “I Talk to the Wind.” It features Fripp’s lyrical acoustic guitar playing, Haskell’s lead vocal as mentioned above, and some lovely flute solos by Collins. The song is in E major, Fripp opening with combinations of single notes, strums, and arpeggios in the tonic chord, an A-major chord, an E-major 7th chord, and A major again.

Haskell’s singing introduces two groupies, Cadence and Cascade, and the man they’re interested in, Jade, who depending on the interpretation of Sinfield’s lyric is variously portrayed as, for example, a singer, or a Silk Road merchant trading goods from the Far East. The names “Cadence and Cascade” suggest the two women’s beauty (more on the meanings of their names later); “Jade” suggests his wealth.

The women worship him for his wealth, power, and fame, but grow disappointed with him as they get to know him better: “As his veil fell aside…They found him just a man.” His phony appeal is comparable to that of a prostitute: “Sad paper courtesan.”

In the world of traditional sex roles, which still largely existed in the West as of 1970, women found their only option for gaining wealth and social status was through a man, so when they met a rich and powerful man, they idealized him…only to find later that he is just as faulty as any other man of modest means. Masculinity is an ideal that is rarely, if ever, even approached, let alone attained.

The bridge opens with Fripp playing one of his “devices,” a celeste, with an ascension of notes: B, C-sharp, E, F-sharp, and G-sharp; this is heard over an A major seventh chord, then with the switch to an A minor seventh chord, we hear celeste notes of G-sharp, A, B, C, and D, E, and F-sharp. We also hear Keith Tippett‘s jazzy piano in the background.

The verse of the bridge has Haskell singing about the lovemaking between the groupies and Jade, their worshipping of his wealth (“sequin,” and “velvet-gloved hand”) and fame (“Cascade kissed his name”). In a larger sense, the groupies’ worship of Jade can represent the idolatry of famous people in general, and the simping for billionaires. This applies to men and women, as worshippers and worshipped.

After the first flute solo, we hear a refrain of the “sad paper courtesan” verse, except that Cadence and Cascade now “knew [Jade] just a man” (my emphasis). The groupies have left him behind in their disappointment in him.

One of the biggest problems in our world is that, because of the worship of fame, wealth, status, and power, people keep aspiring to it, instead of sharing everything so that the basic needs of everyone are met. We aim for these heights, then in disappointment we fall…which leads me to my next point.

Apart from the groupies’ names suggesting their beauty, “Cadence and Cascade”–something Haskell sings several times leading into Collins’s second flute solo–are also words coming from the Latin world cadere, meaning “to fall.” There’s the musical cadence of resolving a harmonic progression back to the tonic, and a cascade is a waterfall (the element of water again, as jade is associated with the element of earth). Both meanings suggest musical or natural beauty, or the beauty of a woman’s cascade of long, wavy hair flowing down to her shoulders. There’s also the fall of the girls’ disappointment on knowing Jade is “just a man.”

V: In the Wake of Poseidon (including “Libra’s Theme”)

This track reworks the first album in two ways: the title, of course, parallels that of the last song on Side Two of the first album; more properly, though, this song is a reworking of “Epitaph,” the last song on Side One of the first album.

Sinfield apparently rewrote the lyric to this song about twenty-five times to make it tie in with the cover art, which therefore should be discussed now. I’ll describe each of the dozen faces not as they appear on the outer album cover–which shows a painting called The 12 Archetypes, or The 12 Faces of Humankind, by Tammo de Jongh–but in order of appearance as Sinfield brings them up in his lyric.

The Observer, a bald old man with spectacles up above his brow and his hand on his chin, looks pensive and scientifically-minded. His elements are Air and Earth. The opening lines, “Plato’s spawn cold ivied eyes/Snare truth in bone and globe,” refer to him. He represents Western science in the service of cold-blooded imperialism, taking over the globe and, exploiting it, reducing all indigenous resistance to skulls and bones.

The Joker, a harlequin painted in reds and yellows and smiling in a triangular hat, is the subject of the next two lines of the first verse. His elements being Fire and Air, he’d “coin pointless games/Sneer jokes in parrot’s robe.” His sardonic humor points out our everyday foibles and political corruption, but it’s “pointless” in how it does nothing to solve our problems.

The Actress is next. She’s Egyptian, with long pearl earrings and necklaces, and with tears running down her cheeks. Her elements are Water and Fire. She is represented in the lines, “Dame Scarlet Queen/Sheds sudden theatre rain.” She weeps for the sins of the world, as does…

…The Enchantress, her long dark hair going across her face. She has Water and Earth as her elements. She “knows every human pain.”

As I said above, the title track is especially concerned with the four elements, two of which are associated with each of the twelve archetypes, as we’ve seen and will continue to see. All four are also heard twice in the next verse, a bridge between the first and third verses, this latter continuing to depict the twelve archetypal faces.

Though the elements are associated with peace, as we saw in “Peace–A Beginning,” the “World [is] on the scales,” with war and destruction on one scale, balanced on the other with peace and its four elements. This “Balance of change” means the world is teetering “on the scales” between peace and war. Which side will win? Which will outweigh the other? Will it be the side that wants peace and justice for everyone, or will it be the side of the imperialistic warmongers, whose recklessness is pushing us all ever closer to nuclear armageddon?

This song, and therefore the entire album, has as much relevance for us today as it did back in 1970, with its Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation between the US/NATO and the USSR. We’re experiencing a new, and utterly needless, new Cold War between the Western, NATO-allied powers on one side, and Russia, China, the DPRK, and Iran on the other. Between the two sides are thousands of nuclear weapons, and no attempt at détente is even being considered.

To return to the archetypes, the next one is The Patriarch, an old philosopher with long white hair and a beard. He’s frowning, with a furrowed brow. Surrounding him are such shapes as flowers and snowflakes. His elements are Air and Water. Referring to him are the lines, “Bishop’s kings spin judgement’s blade/Scratch ‘Faith’ on nameless graves.” The Church controls the heads of state–The Patriarch being one of these stern religious leaders–and it pushes the kings to fight ‘holy’ wars. (One might think of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of Ely persuading Henry V to invade France.)

The Old Woman would “hoard ash and sand.” She has a wrinkled, sad face, and her hair is wrapped in white. Her elements are Earth and Air. Such women are “Harvest hags,” peasant farmers, whom we associate with the working class, yet these peasants are betraying the fellow proletarians in that they “rack rope and chain for slaves,” the next archetype to be discussed.

The Slave, a black African with earrings and a nose-ring, has Earth and Fire as her elements. The slaves “fear fermented words,” that is, they’re scared of revolution, and like the kulaks who hoarded grain during the famine in the USSR in the early 1930s, they “rear to spoil the feast.” This lack of solidarity among the poor is what allows the rich to stay in power.

The Fool, the laughing man to the centre-left of the front cover of the album, with the pink face, the blond beard, and the flowers in his hair, is “the mad man [who] smiles/To him it matters least.” In his foolish, delusional state, he doesn’t care about the corruption in the world, because like The Slave and the Old Woman, he has no class consciousness. His elements are Fire and Water.

After this verse is an instrumental passage that includes the (Libra’s?) theme (“Air, fire, earth, and water”), only it’s played by Fripp on the Mellotron instead of sung by Lake. I suspect that part of the reason this song is called “In the Wake of Poseidon” is that the god of sea and earthquakes best represents all four elements: the earth and water aspects hardly need to be elaborated on; air can be included in its being blown as wind over the sea, making waves, and Poseidon is known for his fiery temper–consider how he treated Odysseus after he blinded the god’s cyclopean son, Polyphemus. I’m assuming this section is “Libra’s Theme,” given our “world on the scales.”

To go back to the archetypal faces, the next one is The Warrior, wearing a steel helmet and a full black beard, and baring his teeth, ready to fight. His elements are Fire and Earth, and he’s represented in these lines: “Heroes’ hands drain stones for blood/To whet the scaling knife.” The weapons of war wound not only bodies, but the Earth as well.

Next comes The Logician, a wizard with dark hair and a long dark beard. He’s holding a wand in one hand while the other is held up high. There are stars all around him, presumably the magic from one of his spells. He’s represented with the lines, “Magi blind with visions light/Net death in dread of life.” He represents the theologian or philosopher who is ‘blinded by the light’ of his own dogma, preferring death and the peace of a presumed heaven over the pain of living here.

The naïve sheep of these religious shepherds are represented in The Child, a girl with long blonde hair and a face of sweet innocence. The necklace she’s wearing has a white key on it. Her elements are Water and Air, and these lines represent her in the song: “Their children kneel in Jesus’ till/They learn the price of nails.” To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must be as a child (Luke 18:17); hence, the key on The Child’s necklace (Matthew 16:19). Still, learning “the price of nails” means learning either to submit to the powers-that-be, whether they’re religious or political, or to suffer as Jesus did for defying them.

And the last archetype is The Mother Earth, or Mother Nature. We see her lying asleep in the grass in left profile, with dark skin and flowers and butterflies all around her. Her elements are Earth and Water, and the last two lines of the song refer to her: “Whilst all around our Mother Earth/Waits balanced on the scales.” Our Earth sits passively as mankind decides the fate of all living creatures who have her as their home: nuclear war, or peace? A healthy planet, or ecocide? Our collective fate is being weighed in the balance, “on the scales,” by psychopathic leaders who care about wealth and maintaining their power, and not about us.

To understand the deeper meaning of archetypes, one must look into analytical psychology, Jung‘s offshoot from Freudian psychoanalysis. Jungian psychology has a grounding in such psychoanalytical concepts as the unconscious and repression, but unlike Freud the atheist, Jung developed an interest in myth, mysticism, and religion far beyond just their psychological symbolism. As a result, he broke with Freud, who would later speak derisively of Jung as one who would “aspire to be a prophet” (Freud, page 280).

The archetypes are characters that reside in the collective unconscious, that aspect of the unconscious we all share and that has been inherited throughout human history. These include the Sage (which can find its equivalent in the song and album cover as The Patriarch), Innocent (The Child), Hero (Warrior), Magician (Logician), Jester (Joker), and Creator or Caregiver (The Mother Earth). The point is that we have all of these characters, hidden deep down in our unconscious; they influence how we think and interact in the world. To this extent, they control us, and therefore control mankind’s collective fate.

In this song, we can see how unhappy these twelve are, or how manipulative (or manipulated) they are. They’re in the depths of the ocean of the collective unconscious, so “the wake of Poseidon” is, literally speaking, the making conscious all of these characters that reside deep within the sea-god’s realm. If we can make their sorrow conscious, we can integrate them, become whole and healthy, then work to save our planet from ecocide and nuclear annihilation. Hence, the deep relevance of this song back in 1970 and, even more, today.

VI: Peace–A Theme

This is a short instrumental for solo acoustic guitar, about a minute long, in A major.

Fripp plays the melody Lake sang a cappella on “Peace–A Beginning,” as well as the bridge melody (“Searching for…, etc.) that we will hear on “Peace–An End.” Fripp opens with a strum of an open A major chord with an added sixth.

From this chord, he embellishes the melody Lake sang before with an appoggiatura: he does a hammer-on and a pull-off as part of the continuing melody with E, F-sharp, E, and D-flat. Then, he strums a D-flat minor 7th chord, and single notes D-flat and E, then a hammer-on to F-sharp, and a strum of a D-major 7th chord, the E, D-flat, and an A major chord, with a high note of D-flat.

Next, he strums the D-major 7th chord, and plays the above appoggiatura with the E, F-sharp, E, and D-flat. Then, there’s the strum of the D-flat minor 7th chord again, then a strum of an E dominant 9th chord, then a strum of a D major 6/9 chord, and an ending of the melody that includes another appoggiatura, a hammer-on and pull-off of F-sharp, A, F-sharp, and E, then the D-major 7th chord again.

All of the above is repeated, then we come to the bridge (“Searching for…,” etc., in “Peace–An End”). Fripp strums an A-major chord, then an A chord with a major second instead of a major third, then the A major six chord again. Then he plays arpeggiated chords of D-flat suspension 4th and a D-flat major. Next, a melody of F-sharp, A, B, D-sharp, E, D-sharp, B, G-sharp, and F-sharp is played over chords of D-major 7th, D-flat minor, and D-major 7th again.

After an E suspension 4th chord and an E major chord in the dominant, Fripp repeats the bridge section as described in the previous paragraph, but he ends the piece with a strum of an A 6/9 chord, only without a third, and with the sixth in the bass; then he softly hits an E-flat, a flattened fifth for A major.

VII: Cat Food

This song is another example of King Crimson doing a perverse variation on the 12-bar blues structure, with Tippett mixing in dissonant tone clusters with his more usual jazzy piano playing, and with the usual 4/4 time getting bars of 6/8 thrown in between from time to time. The song is in E minor.

The song is satirizing capitalism and consumerism, and all of the maddening effects these have on people, hence the piano discords. A woman shopping in a supermarket wants to talk to the manager, presumably to make a complaint. “Grooning to the muzak” sounds like an ironic comment on Fripp’s instrumental with drummer Michael Giles and his bassist brother, Peter (who plays all the bass parts on this album instead of Lake), “Groon,” Side B to the “Cat Food” single. Groon is a pun on groan, a complaining sound.

The blatantly atonal “Groon,” truly an acquired taste for most listeners, is a piece of avant-garde jazz that sounds like a Cecil Taylor improvisation, but with Fripp’s guitar replacing Taylor’s piano. The supermarket shopper, however, is annoyed with the muzak, or ‘elevator music,’ which is annoying at the other extreme: it’s music so bland, so ‘nice,’ and so conventional that it desperately needs a little dissonance to make it half-way interesting to listen to. The contrast between “Groon” and muzak is also the contrast between music as experimental art and music as sellable commodity.

She lays out her goods, as if to complain about them to the manager. They’re all “conveniently frozen,” so she can “come back for more” as soon as she’s finished with them. This is convenient for capitalists, who can make more money when she comes back. Ironically, this ‘convenience’ is what she has to complain about.

Next, the woman shopper is cooking at home, whipping up “a chemical brew/Croaking to a neighbour as she polishes a sabre.” The “chemical brew” suggests some kind of processed food from the supermarket, superficially tasty, but ultimately bad for you. Just as she ‘grooned’ to the muzak, now she ‘croaks’ in complaint to a neighbour, suggesting the social alienation that comes from the same source as the fetishized commodities that she’s bought–capitalism. The ‘sabre’ she polishes is presumably her cooking knife, but calling it a sabre evokes the idea that it’s used for killing rather than feeding.

She “knows how to flavour a stew,” but her meal is “poisoned especially for you,” because as I said above, this processed food, in its “tin,” is bad for you. “Hurri Curri” sounds like a brand name of cat food, or its particular flavour. It’s also a pun on hara kari, a form of ritual suicide, given how willingly eating such innutritious, processed food, this ‘hurried curry,’ this instant food, is bad for you.

Because the capitalist system is focused more on profit than on providing a nutritious product, we get the blues from it, hence the song’s 12-bar structure. The alienation from capitalism causes mental health problems, too, hence the piano dissonances, Lake’s mad cackling at the end of this second verse, and “your mother’s quite insane,” in the repeated bridge verse.

“Cat food…again?” sounds like a complaint about eating the same old crap over and over again. Cat food, with its unpleasant smell and even more unpleasant contents, is a metaphor for all the unhealthy junk food we all eat at least once in a while, enriching its producers.

“A fable on the label” of so many of these food products, stuffed in cans, suggests the lie that they’re full of vitamins, minerals, and other nutritious ingredients, when actually the processing and artificial colours, additives, and preservatives ruin the said nutrients, in all likelihood. It’s “drowning in miracle sauce,” meaning that the sauce, however superficially tasty it may be, is killing the nutrients by drowning them. With all of this understanding, the last two lines of the song should be self-explanatory.

The song ends with improvising over the 12-bar blues structure, with its alternating of a few bars of 4/4 with one in 6/8. Michael Giles does a few great drum licks here, as Tippett does with his colourful, jazzy piano.

VIII: The Devil’s Triangle

As I said above, this piece evolved out of “Mars,” the instrumental improvisation that the original King Crimson lineup played in their live shows, based in turn on the first movement of Holst’s The Planets. For this reason, I see the resulting studio version as still thematically linked to the horrors of war, and it’s therefore fitting to have it immediately precede “Peace–An End,” for dialectical purposes as I’ll explain later.

The piece includes three sections, titled “Merday Morn,” “Hand of Sceiron,” and “Garden of Worm.” The first part gives partial writing credit to McDonald, but not the last part, which includes the clip from “The Court of the Crimson King,” which he wrote with Sinfield.

“Merday Morn” opens with a long, slow fade-in: the listener may get impatient waiting to hear any music. It’s as if the music were the sun slowly rising over the watery horizon of the ocean, the beginning of the ‘day of the sea,’ hence the name of this section. We sense that Poseidon is waking up, hence the album’s title, taken literally.

Recall that ‘the Devil’s Triangle’ is another name for the Bermuda Triangle, the legend surrounding the place–the three corners of which are Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico–being that ships and airplanes entering it mysteriously disappear. One senses the fiery wrath of the sea-god here, and why the music is so spooky.

In the entire piece, we have all four elements represented: in “Merday Morn,” the sea obviously represents water, and the rising sun represents fire (as well as Poseidon’s fiery wrath); in “Hand of Sceiron,” air is represented at the end of the section by the sound of strong winds, as if ships are entering a storm; and “Garden of Worm” suggests the element of earth, symbolic of a grave for the dead in sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean, the ground of the seabed.

When we finally start hearing the music, we hear Michael Giles playing a martial beat in 5/4, accompanied by his brother, Peter, on the bass. Fripp is providing melody and harmony on the Mellotron, at first with string section tape, then, when the music starts to get tense, he uses brass section tape. To add to the tension, we’ll hear him play a lot of tritone intervals, which are fitting as the diabolus in musica.

“Hand of Sceiron” begins with a foghorn sound, suggesting that ships are approaching a dangerous area at sea. Along with the tritones heard on the Mellotron, we hear lots more dissonance on, for example, Tippett’s piano. This section ends, as noted above, with those winds. Sceiron refers to violent winds in a myth from an area described in Book IX, Chapter One (section 4) of Strabo‘s Geographica. A ticking metronome sounds like a clock that is ticking towards the end of one’s life.

Of course, the tension is raised to a climax in the “Garden of Worm” section, with its faster tempo and heightened dissonance. Independent layers of sound are put together: the 5/4 martial beat heard on the drums, with the bass in 4/4 playing descending fifths, and dissonance in the Mellotron and piano tone clusters. It all descends into chaos, including, by way of xenochrony, a brief passage for string section, and the clip from “The Court of the Crimson King.” It all ends with flurries of flute notes and a soft, arpeggiated resolution in E major on Fripp’s acoustic guitar.

So, what does all of this music mean? What does a ship entering the Bermuda Triangle and going missing there, all the passengers presumed dead, signify? The piece’s link with “Mars,” with the martial beat (though different from Holst’s original rhythm, because Holst’s estate did not give Fripp permission to use it), suggests the symbolism of war, too. But what do a ship lost in a sea storm, and soldiers killed or missing in action in a war, symbolize in “The Devil’s Triangle,” and In the Wake of Poseidon as a whole?

Recall the archetypes from the title track and the album cover, and how these reside in the collective unconscious. In the wake of Poseidon means ‘as a(n unpleasant) consequence of the sea-god.’ The realm of Poseidon, the ocean, is symbolic of the unconscious, both personal and collective. So as a consequence of confronting Poseidon and his tempestuous ways, we awaken the unconscious and discover those unpleasant parts of ourselves that we want to reject, repress, or project onto other people. To confront them is to confront what Jung called the Shadow. This is a scary, but necessary and enlightening experience.

“The Devil’s Triangle” begins in silence, and with a slow fade-in, because such a beginning represents not only the unawareness of unconscious conflicts, but also the unwillingness to learn of them, the resistance against them. As the music gets more and more dissonant, one is becoming more and more aware of the unpleasant, rejected parts of the Shadow.

The social problems dealt with in the other songs–urban alienation and decadence in “Pictures of a City,” hero-worship of wealth and celebrity in “Cadence and Cascade,” and capitalist consumerism in “Cat Food”–have their psychological roots in these unconscious, repressed conflicts. The way to end the conflicts and attain peace of mind is not to avoid them, by sailing around the Bermuda Triangle of the psyche, but to go through it and risk the dangers therein.

And dangerous it is. Jung warned of these risks when attempting to do what he called individuation through Shadow work, dream interpretation, and Active Imagination. One is advised, when doing this inner work, to have someone monitoring you, ideally a fully-trained therapist specializing in Jungian psychology. Otherwise, one risks navigating the treacherous waters of repressed traumas, leading to psychological fragmentation, a psychotic break with reality (what Lacan called The Real), which is what the “Garden of Worm” section represents.

The significant thing, though, that happens if you can make it through the maelstrom symbolized by the ending of “The Devil’s Triangle” (as Jung apparently did by bravely facing the demons of his own unconscious), and can integrate the darker aspects of your mind with the lighter ones, you can come out the other side and find peace and bliss, as symbolized by the pretty flurry of flute notes and Fripp’s acoustic guitar ending.

(Such psychological integration includes a man confronting his anima, as represented by the six female faces on the album cover and described in the title track, and a woman confronting her animus, the six male archetypes on the cover and in the title track. In this connection, the sea can be masculine, Poseidon, or feminine, Thalassa. La mer est la mère.)

I’ve written many times about my personal interpretation of the symbolism of the ouroboros, as representing the dialectical relationship between opposites as the meeting ends (the serpent’s head and tail) of a circular continuum (the serpent’s coiled body) including all intermediate points between the extremes. We can hear this oneness in contradiction in “The Devil’s Triangle” in how the music starts in peaceful silence, then the music comes in and gets increasingly dissonant, a move from the serpent’s biting head, down its coiled body towards its bitten tail. At the tail of extreme chaos and pain, we cross over to the head and back to peace and bliss, leading thus to…

IX: Peace–An End

One interesting thing about the “Peace” trilogy is how this last one is musically in ternary form (ABA), while “Peace–A Theme” is in binary form (AABB), and “Peace–A Beginning” is just the A theme heard twice. It’s as though peace begins as just a germinating idea, then it develops, and now it is complete, after having gone through the necessary hell of “The Devil’s Triangle.”

Furthermore, the first part is essentially a cappella, the second just an acoustic guitar solo, and this last part has both Lake and Fripp. It is musically thus the Hegelian dialectic triad of thesis (“Beginning”), negation (“Theme”), and sublation (“End”), this last part not only being complete, but also a resolution of the contradiction of the previous two parts. In fact, the first two parts ended without perfect resolutions: the A, F-sharp, C, and A-sharp on Fripp’s guitar ending “Beginning”; the A 6-9 chord with the sixth in the bass and the E-flat ending “Theme.”

Only now do we have a truly peaceful resolution in E major, with Lake’s last sung note, on “war,” being a D-flat, a major sixth in relation to the tonic, and so it’s reasonably consonant. It suggests, in combination with “war,” a somewhat tenuous peace–since when is perfect peace ever realized, anyway?–but it’s peace all the same, and therefore a fitting end to the album.

Two of the four elements are mentioned in the first line of the first verse–water and air (“sea” and “wind”). Water will again be mentioned in the first line of the last verse, too–“stream.” The reference to “dawn on a day without end” suggests earth and fire, in that we imagine the sun peeking over the horizon, that is, over the land, hills, and mountains in the morning. The fire of the sun will shine on an eternal day, too.

Because the four elements are so fundamentally what make up everything as we imagine it here, they bring us closer to the blissful oneness of Brahman, and therefore to peace, nirvana. Those twelve archetypal faces are each associated with two of the elements; and since attaining psychological peace, as I described it above–with my ouroboros symbolism–involves confronting the twelve archetypes in the Shadow of the ocean of the unconscious, then peace is in this way also associated with the elements.

A bird sings as you smile because it is pleased with your happiness–it is your friend. Peace causes a foe to love you as a friend; we must take those troublesome archetypes of the unconscious and make them our friends–this is how we change war into peace. We bring love to a child, like the sweet, innocent girl on the cover with the white key on her necklace. She has the key to heaven, remember, because one has to be as a child to enter heaven, the realm of peace.

You search for your friends, but can’t find them, because you foolishly don’t realize how close they are to you, like the nirvana and Buddhahood that the lost vagabond son of the parable doesn’t realize he already has, personified by his father. You search for yourself everywhere outside, but you don’t realize that you have to do the inner work, as described in my interpretation of “The Devil’s Triangle,” to find yourself within, in the twelve archetypes, the four elements, and the Atman that is already one with the oceanic feeling of Brahman.

The heart is what empathy flows from, so that’s why peace is a stream from there. Breadth, that is, the width of tolerance and open-mindedness, is the dawn, or beginning, of peace.

The fire of the sun will burn forever for peace, that is, without end; yet peace is also the end, ironically, like death, of the war. The war people would have had in mind back in 1970 was, of course, the Vietnam War, wishing it would end.

There are other wars, though, besides literal ones, that need to end. There’s the emotional war of psychological conflict, as dramatized in “The Devil’s Triangle” and the title track. The Jungian inner work described above to integrate the light and dark parts of the psyche, the conscious and unconscious, to bring about inner peace, can be compared to the Buddhist’s quest for nirvana.

Nirvana literally refers to the blowing out of a flame representing desire, and therefore suffering also. Nirvana is the resulting peace from having extinguished the fire of the delusion of a permanent ego. Yet Sinfield’s lyric, of peace as the dawn of a day without end, implies a permanently burning fire, while peace is also the end…and nirvana is the end of suffering.

How can we reconcile this contradiction, of a permanent fire and its extinguishment as both meaning peace? We can do so as the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism does, by equating nirvana with samsara, the cycle of reincarnation. We did so before with the dialectical interpretation of attaining peace by first going through the Devil’s Triangle, by passing first through hell to get to heaven. Similarly, the bodhisattva first swears off nirvana until he’s helped all living creatures to get there, hence they all travel there on the Great Vehicle, that boat that must weather Poseidon’s storm at sea.

Note how Lake’s singing on “Peace–An End” brings back the reverb at the end, just as “Peace–A Beginning” started with reverb. This beginning and ending reverb thus gives us a sense that the album has come full circle, like the cyclical eternity that the ouroboros originally symbolized. In this sense, we can see how peace never ends, even in a world full of suffering. Nirvana is samsara because we can only have peace and happiness by accepting the inevitability of pain.

X: Conclusion

Based on the interpretation I’ve given above, I must say that In the Wake of Poseidon, though not exactly a masterpiece, deserves better than being dismissed as a mere copy, or sequel, of In the Court of the Crimson King. To be sure, much of the second album does rework the first, but there are other things going on that shouldn’t be ignored.

Side Two of Poseidon is essentially new (the xenochrony notwithstanding). The first album presented the problems of the world; the second album expands on the discussion of those problems, and it also proposes a solution. Most importantly of all, In the Wake of Poseidon presents a kind of Jungian odyssey through hell to get to heaven, giving it a kind of universality of human experience that makes it an album that doesn’t just live in the shadow of its predecessor, but exists in its own right.

Mouths

When those fiery lips open wide,
and the fierce fangs are bared,
a lot of scalding
air comes out,
and a wiggly, wicked tongue
says a flurry of biting words
that make the lower lip quiver,

Making another mouth open.
It, too, says cutting words
that leave
big holes
that lick you in a fight,
leaving you bitten all over
with a swollen, bloody fat lip.

So, maybe those lips should just stay closed,
those teeth of yours should be kept covered,
no hole exposed to make more gaping holes,
a mouth that is just for eating and tasting,
and no rude talking with your mouth full.
There’s biting so you aren’t getting bitten,
and there are lips that kiss and aren’t lippy.

Analysis of ‘Brain Salad Surgery’

I: Introduction and Cover

Brain Salad Surgery is ELP‘s fourth studio album, released in late 1973, after the prog rock supergroup‘s eponymous debut, Tarkus, the live album Pictures at an Exhibition, and Trilogy. It was produced by singer/bassist/guitarist Greg Lake, as were all of the trio’s previous albums.

Though it initially got a mixed critical response, Brain Salad Surgery‘s reputation has improved over time. It had always been a commercial success, reaching #2 in the UK and #11 in the US; it eventually went gold in both countries.

Here is a link to the full album, and here‘s a link to all of the lyrics.

HR Giger‘s superb album cover gives a vivid visual representation of the album’s central theme of duality–male vs female, man vs machine, and good vs evil. The male/female duality is represented by the woman’s face in the circle in the middle of the cover; under her chin is the end of a phallus pointing up along her neck, the rest of the phallus being represented, outside the metal circle, by a short cylinder and a circle with ELP representing the balls. The record company insisted on removing the phallus for obvious reasons, so on early releases of the album, one instead saw it airbrushed away and replaced with a…shaft…of glowing light.

The album’s title–derived from the lyrics to Dr. John‘s “Right Place, Wrong Time” (released earlier the same year), and replacing ELP’s working title, Whip Some Skull on Ya–is a reference to fellatio, hence the phallus just under the woman’s face…and the skull at the top.

The cover originally opened up, like two front doors to a building, to reveal the whole head of the woman with her eyes closed, as opposed to seeing the skull’s eyeholes over her when the cover is closed, indicating the dualities of life and death, good and evil, and man and machine.

II: Jerusalem

Side One begins with two tracks that are adaptations of other composers’ works, something the band had done several times before, as with pieces like “The Barbarian” (based on Bartók‘s Allegro barbaro for solo piano), “Hoedown,” by Aaron Copland, and the aforementioned piano suite by Mussorgsky. As for track one of Brain Salad Surgery, ELP did an arrangement of a hymn by Hubert Parry, who set William Blake‘s poem, “And did those feet in ancient time” (from the epic, Milton), to music.

“Jerusalem” was released as a single, but it failed to chart in the UK; actually, the BBC banned this ‘rock’ version for potential “blasphemy” (despite how reverent the band’s arrangement was). Apart from being understood as a religious song, “Jerusalem” is also considered patriotic to England, even proposed as the national anthem.

Now, the long-held modern assumption that Blake’s text is based on an apocryphal story–about Jesus walking on English soil during His lost years–is unlikely to be true, because no such story existed, apparently, before the twentieth century; instead, Blake’s text is based on a story that it was Joseph of Arimathea who allegedly went to England to preach the Gospel there. I find such an interpretation hard to follow, though, since the text explicitly refers to “the holy Lamb of God” and “the Countenance Divine” being in England.

In any case, the notion that the feet of Christ (or those of Joseph of Arimathea, for that matter…whichever) sanctified English soil by treading on it is jingoistic nonsense that actually turns the meaning of Blake’s poem into its opposite. The key to understanding the text is not “England’s green and pleasant land,” but rather “these dark Satanic mills,” referring to the early Industrial Revolution and its destruction of nature and human relationships, or to the Church of England and how it imposed conformity to the social and class systems.

People who see patriotism and conventional Christianity in Blake’s poem are blind to his irony in using Protestant mystical allegory to express his passionate advocacy for radical social and political change. He wasn’t saying that Jesus walked in England, thus making it ‘the greatest country in the world,’ and worthy of global domination. He was asking if Jesus went there, where the “dark Satanic mills” would later be found.

That he meant such a visit seems unlikely, but if the visitor was Joseph of Arimathea, at least he would have done a proselytizing of the primitive Christianity of the first century AD, not that of later centuries, with the corrupt Catholic or Protestant Churches of Blake’s time, those that subjugated other lands and justified their imperialism with their ‘superior, civilized’ religion.

Blake says he “will not cease from Mental Fight” (my emphasis), meaning his moral struggle with the powers-that-be, the industrial capitalists who used religion as Marx would later call “the opium of the people” to maintain social control in the interests of the ruling class. Blake’s bow, arrows, spear, and sword are metaphors for all he would use to bring about revolution and social justice (his metaphor for these being “Jerusalem”) in England; they were never meant to aid in the building of empire, much to the chagrin of the British patriots who want to read his poem in that way. Even Parry grew disgusted with the jingoistic misuse of his hymn.

This ironic surface patriotism and conformist piety as cloaking Blake’s real revolutionary social critique plays well into the theme of duality–good vs evil–on Brain Salad Surgery. Similarly, it’s fitting that keyboardist/composer/arranger Keith Emerson should have done an adaptation of Parry’s musical setting, one with the usual Emersonian pomp embellishments, but still reverent to the piety of Parry’s music. For again, such a musical style, soon to be contrasted sharply with that of the next track on the album, is a part of the good-vs-evil dualism of Brain Salad Surgery.

III: Toccata

The “dark Satanic mills” of the first track seem to be vividly depicted, in musical form, in this next ELP adaptation of a composer’s work, this one being the fourth movement of the first piano concerto of Argentinian modernist composer Alberto Ginastera. The movement is titled toccata concertata, hence the name of ELP’s adaptation.

Unlike the trite harmony of Parry’s work, this one is violently dissonant, something accentuated by Emerson’s use of raspy synthesizer sounds. Indeed, the dissonance of this adaptation makes King Crimson sound like the Bay City Rollers in comparison.

Another valid comparison of ELP with King Crimson, as far as this second track is concerned, is how we hear a push towards the most state-of-the-art technology. Recall how the 1980s King Crimson used guitar synthesizers, the Chapman stick, and Simmons electronic drums. “Toccata” boasts (as does “Jerusalem”) the use of the very first polyphonic synthesizer, the Moog Apollo, and eight specially developed drum synthesizers, used in the track’s middle percussion section, arranged by drummer/percussionist Carl Palmer.

Again, this use of the latest technology of the time, as mixed in with more conventional instruments and singing, reflects the album’s theme of dualism–in this case, the dualism of man vs machine.

I’d like to do a comparison/contrast of Ginastera’s fourth movement with ELP’s adaptation. I won’t cover every detail, as that would be too difficult and tediously long; so I’ll point out and compare/contrast a number of highlights. (Here is a link to the entire piano concerto, with a video of the score; move it ahead to about 18:50 to get to the fourth movement.)

ELP’s adaptation adds a considerable amount of material to Ginastera’s piece (as well as removing much of it), including of course the percussion section in the middle, as I mentioned above. Another addition is at the beginning, with Emerson playing a synthesizer, and Palmer hitting tympani.

Emerson plays a motif of B-flat, E, E-flat, and A, then Palmer hits A, A, A, and C. Then Emerson plays the same notes again, a bit faster, adding a C and an A, and Palmer does a short roll on A. Emerson goes up an octave to play the same first opening four notes, and Palmer does another, longer roll on A. Emerson, still in the higher octave, plays the notes faster, with the added C and A, and Palmer doesn’t another, still longer, crescendo roll on A.

Next, ELP’s adaptation converges with Ginastera, but with the latter’s arrangement of the B-flat, E, E-flat, and A motif played predominantly on horns, with all the notes sustaining in a swelling dissonance, while Emerson plays the notes on his synthesizer, intensifying the tension by adding a raspy, grating tone to it. The motif is played as I described above, then transposed an octave and a semitone higher to give B, F, E, and B-flat.

ELP come in with Emerson on organ, Lake on bass, and Palmer on drums. In Ginastera’s original, we hear pounding dissonances on the piano in 3/4=6/8 time, with the fourth bar in 5/8 time as an exception.

With the piano beginning in octaves of E in the bass, the orchestra is playing a cluster of eighth notes in A, B-flat, and E-flat. The E-flat goes up to a G-flat (with the E in the bass going down to a C-sharp with the G-flats), then back to E-flat, up and down and up and down. These movements up and down occur at irregular times, creating the illusion of odd time signatures, but Ginastera’s score has the whole passage in the same 3/4=6/8 time. The playing sounds fairly subdued in Ginastera’s original, but Emerson’s organ gives the passage a fiery extroversion.

The next passage has piano playing in the bass, whereas ELP’s version has Emerson playing it on synthesizer. A beginning in F and E leads to the opening motif of B-flat, E, E-flat, and A, then ending in another swelling dissonance reminding us of the opening one, but transposed a whole tone higher, giving us C, F, G-flat, and B (reverse the second and third notes to see the exact parallels). In Ginastera’s original, these notes are heard in the orchestra, predominantly the brass; in ELP’s version, Emerson does it on the synth, ending with that rasping sound again.

Next, a tune with a galloping rhythm, starting off with eighth notes going back and forth in F-sharp and A, then going to F-sharp, B, B-flat, C, A, F-sharp, and E, is heard on the strings; Emerson plays it on the organ. These seven eighth notes are heard three times, accented in a way that gives the listener the impression of 7/8 time, but again, Ginastera’s score notates it all as 3/4=6/8 time.

The up-and-down of F-sharp and A continues for a while, then we hear a five-note ostinato of B, A, F-sharp, E, and F-sharp, which grows dissonant with the addition of the horns, and ends with the piano playing a descension in octaves. ELP’s version ends the five-note ostinato, played on the organ, with more dissonant, angular synthesizer.

More of a galloping rhythm is heard in piano chords (on organ in the ELP version); this leads to more galloping, but with switches from 3/4=6/8 time to a bar of 5/8–this happens twice, then it returns to the regular 3/4=6/8 time. Again, what is piano in Ginastera is organ in ELP. Also, Ginastera’s version develops this switching of the time from six to five, while ELP’s version brings the tension to a climax with organ chords featuring a tritone of E and B-flat. Palmer also plays this tritone on the tympani.

Later on in Ginastera’s score, we hear a variation on the passage mentioned earlier, the cluster of repeated eighth notes, the top of which is the E-flat that goes up to the G-flat, then down, and up and down at irregular times. This time, however, the notes are a second-inversion A-minor triad with A-flat and C-flat in the bass. The top C-natural will go up to an E-flat, and down and up and down, in the same irregular pattern as with the E-flat and G-flat before. We hear the orchestra, predominantly strings, doing this; ELP’s version has the organ doing it.

After this, the piano does more galloping rhythms, with a few dissonant seconds thrown in here and there. Later, the piano does more developments of that passage with the time changes back and forth between six and five as discussed above, with an additional bar of 7/8 sandwiched in the middle. This passage isn’t in ELP’s version, which skips ahead in Ginastera’s score to bar 200.

Here, the galloping rhythm is done on pizzicato strings, starting with E-flat and G-flat going up and down in the bass clef. Then we hear E-flat, G-flat, A-flat, and A-natural three times before transposing the first two notes to A-natural and C. Emerson plays this line on the organ, but develops it further before going to the next passage.

A French horn plays A, D, G, and G-sharp, then A, E-flat, D, D-flat, G, and G-sharp, etc. Emerson plays this line on a synthesizer an octave higher. After this phrase, Ginastera has us hear five pairings of eighth notes of a minor second (C-sharp and D), with groupings of two to three eighth rests in between the first, second, third, and fourth pairings of those notes. They’re played softly in his score, but Emerson plays this rhythm as stabbing, loud organ dissonances.

A trumpet plays F, B, B-flat, and E three times; this leads to a climactic, dissonant passage. ELP’s version builds up this tension much more, right from the beginning of this passage, on the synthesizer. Ginastera does glissandi down and up on the piano; Emerson does a downward glissando on the organ.

At bar 240, the piano plays octaves in C, F-sharp, F-natural, and B, a restatement of the opening motif, but transposed up a whole tone; Emerson plays this on the synthesizer, using it to embellish the dissonance further and bringing this tensely climactic moment to raspy near-chaos, leading to Palmer’s percussion section. Ginastera’s original, however, further develops these themes on the piano, coming soon to the end of the movement.

Palmer pounds away on the tympani for a while, striking a gong here and there. This comes to an end, then we hear the soft hitting of A and C on the tympani, and on both tympani and tubular bells. Emerson plays three soft, dense chords on the piano as this passage comes to the end.

Next comes a passage with Lake playing electric guitar, with Palmer in the background hitting the tympani. Lake is playing, among other things, variations on that opening motif of sharpened tonic, fifth, flattened fifth, and tonic an octave higher.

The climax of the percussion section is Palmer showing off with a solo on his drum kit that features the drum synthesizer, and all the flashy, extraverted electronic sounds it can make.

After this, ELP ends their adaptation with a reprise of the section starting with A, D, G, G-sharp, etc. (i.e., the French horn line in Ginastera’s original). Again, Emerson intensifies the dissonant tension with that raspy synthesizer in ways totally different from the dissonant tension ending Ginastera’s original.

Both pieces end more or less the same way, with twelve sets of eighth notes of a dissonant chord played molto sforzatissimo, by the orchestra in the original, and on the organ in ELP’s version. The band played their recording of the adaptation for Ginastera in order to get his permission to publish it. The composer gladly gave it, describing ELP’s adaptation as “Diabolic!” and “Terrible!” These words were meant as compliments, though, for he felt that ELP had captured the mood of his music as no one else ever had.

That this music is “diabolic” makes it a perfectly dualistic contrast to the ‘piety’ of “Jerusalem.” Hence, we can see these two adaptations as thematically fitting within the context of Brain Salad Surgery as a whole. An outward appearance of trite piety masks the evil inside.

(Incidentally, a piece I composed years ago, my Divertimento for Strings, has a third movement, presto furioso, that is inspired by ELP’s adaptation of Ginastera’s toccata concertata, though I must insist that I used all my own notes and themes, not theirs. If you’re interested, please check it out.)

IV: Still…You Turn Me On

Lake was always sure to include an acoustic guitar ballad on every ELP album, and Brain Salad Surgery is no exception. Earlier, and in my opinion, far better examples of such ballads are “Lucky Man” and “From the Beginning.”

A curious thing about Brain Salad Surgery is how the musical style jumps all over the place. Normally, one tries to find a reasonably consistent style from track to track, but on this album, ELP seemed to be deliberately going as far in the opposite direction as possible. The album has a hymn, a violently modernist piece, a syrupy love ballad, a honky tonk piano farce, and a sci-fi epic–part standard prog, part jazz/piano sonata.

As far as I’m concerned, the only way to see unity in such musical and lyrical disunity is to hear it in terms of dialectical dualism, of finding a paradoxical unity in opposites. So, in these opening three tracks, we have the sentimentality (thesis) of Lake’s ballad, the brutal ugliness (negation) of the Ginastera adaptation, and the ironic piety masking evil (sublation) of the Parry/Blake adaptation. That Lake’s ballad is a love song also gives us the duality of male and female, some romanticized brain salad surgery? After all, he is turned on.

The instrumentation of the ballad reflects the man-vs-machine duality, in that on the one hand, we hear the human voice, Lake’s acoustic guitar, and Emerson’s harpsichord, but on the other hand, there’s Emerson’s synthesizer and Lake’s electric guitar leads played through a wah-wah pedal.

V: Benny the Bouncer

This song has lyrics written by Lake and Pete Sinfield, a colleague of Lake’s back when both of them were members of the original King Crimson back in 1969 and 1970. Lake would return the favour by helping Sinfield release his solo album, Still, on ELP’s new Manticore record label, as well as contributing vocals and electric guitar on it. Sinfield would also contribute lyrics to Side Two of Brain Salad Surgery, as we’ll soon see.

“Benny the Bouncer” manifests the album’s theme of duality in two ways: first, the use of synthesizer at the beginning, and the use of vocals and honky-tonk-style piano suggests the man-vs-machine motif; second, the light-hearted nature of the music, as juxtaposed with a story about a fight and a violent murder, gives us the duality of good vs evil, or light vs dark.

Benny is already understood to be a bloody, violent sort: “He’d slash your granny’s face up given half the chance,” as Lake sings in his affected Cockney. “Savage Sid,” however, is much meaner. First, he spills his beer on Benny’s boots to test him, then when the two fight, Sid sticks Benny with a switchblade, and Benny ends up with “an ‘atchet, buried in [his] head.” He’s dead now, and “he works for Jesus as the bouncer of St. Peter’s gate.”

All of this fighting, of course, is a reflection of the alienation found in an oppressive, dystopian society, the subject of the epic coming next, “Karn Evil 9,” the real thematic focus of Brain Salad Surgery.

VI: Karn Evil 9, 1st Impression

“Karn Evil” is a pun on carnival; this title for the sci-fi epic was suggested by Sinfield–due to the festive, carnival-like nature of the music heard in the “See the show!” sections of this movement, or “impression”–as a replacement for the originally intended title, “Ganton 9,” a fictional planet on which all evil and decadence has been put.

“Karn Evil” also reflects duality in the sense that the ‘carnival’ show of decadent displays is a pleasing, entertaining diversion (the ‘good’) from the evil and oppression really going on in this dystopian world. Indeed, this epic has real relevance in our world today, in the 2020s, in which such breads and circuses as the Super Bowl, Taylor Swift, OnlyFans, and photos of string-bikini-clad beauties plastered all over our Facebook feeds distract us from such problems as extreme income inequality, escalating wars, a media controlled by the super-rich, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

As for “9,” apart from “Ganton 9,” the meaning of this number could be seen in a subdivision into three of each of the three “impressions.” We all know, of course, about the division of the 1st Impression into two parts, because its length had to be spread over two sides of the original LP. One could, however, divide this impression further–namely, at the break between Lake’s singing of “Fight tomorrow!” and “Step inside, hello!”, or, between the frankly dystopian opening lyrics and the ‘carnival’ section about the “most amazing show.” Hence, three parts for the 1st Impression.

As for the 2nd Impression, it can easily be subdivided into three by virtue of its fast-slow-fast sections, like a short, three-movement piano sonata. The 3rd Impression can be divided in terms of the storyline as given by the lyrics: before the war, from the beginning to “Let the maps of war be drawn”; the middle, five-minute instrumental section and keyboard solo, as dramatizing the war; and the outcome of the war, from “Rejoice! Glory is ours!” to the end.

Anyway, part one of the 1st Impression begins with Emerson doing some contrapuntal playing on the organ. As Lake is singing the first verse, Emerson is playing dark, eerie bass notes on the piano while Palmer is hitting a cowbell.

This first verse establishes the dystopian world of the story, a dystopia disturbingly similar to our own world of the 2020s, “about an ago of power where no one had an hour to spare.” Those who have the power, the capitalist class, ensure that none of us, the working class, have much of any free time, because we’re all overworked and underpaid.

“The seeds have withered” because of environmental damage caused by prioritizing profit over the health of the planet. “Silent children shivered in the cold” because ‘free market’ capitalism has failed to provide for the needs of the poor, rendering so many of them homeless and unheard (“children” here isn’t necessarily to be taken literally; they can be also children in the metaphorical sense of being vulnerable and helpless).

The common people suffer like this because of “the jackals for gold,” or the greedy capitalists. “I’ll be there” to help when the revolution finally comes.

The working class have all been betrayed and silenced by the advocates of neoliberal, ‘free market’ capitalism (whose prophets, including the likes of Milton Friedman, were already making their promises of plenty in a world of ‘small government’ as of 1973, the year Brain Salad Surgery came out, thereby making “Karn Evil 9” prophetic, as I see it). The riot police of the ‘small government’ have “hurt…and beat” the people who try to protest the injustices they’ve been subjected to.

Everyone, working several jobs just to have enough to pay his or her bills, food, and rent, is “praying for survival,” but “there is no compassion” for those who cannot leave this miserable world–these are the homeless, whom it’s against the law to feed, and who suffer anti-homeless architecture and benches.

He, in whose voice Lake is singing, begs for a leader who will rise up and save the world from oppression, who will “help the helpless and the refugee”–that is, the impoverished and those displaced by war in ravaged places like Libya and Syria, or by genocide in Gaza. Again, he says he’ll “be there…to heal their sorrow.”

Next, we have the instrumental break that, in my opinion as described above, divides part one from the real part two of the 1st Impression (the “part two” of this impression beginning on Side Two of the LP being, in my opinion, ‘part three’ in actuality). We hear a tight riff in alternating 6/8 and 4/4, led by a synth melody; this tune will be heard again on Side Two in part two (or ‘part three,’ as I’d have it), but it will all be in 4/4.

This instrumental continues, with more time changes and synthesizer soloing, until it segues into the ‘carnival’ themes and ‘part two,’ as I conceive of it. Now that the dystopian world has been established, we will learn of how the powers-that-be are distracting the people from their oppression with “a most amazing show.” We can relate to this aspect of the story today, with all of the entertaining nonsense we see on TV and social media, distracting us from the horrors of the real world out there.

Those in power have always used two ways of keeping the masses under their control: the carrot and the stick, two seemingly opposed tactics, but actually just opposite sides of the same coin, since they both serve the same political purpose. The world government of Huxley‘s Brave New World uses the carrot of pleasure (sex, drugs, etc.) for social control, whereas the totalitarian government of Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-four uses the stick of coercion and bullying for the same purpose.

“Karn Evil 9” opens with an exposition of the dystopian stick, and with the “most amazing show,” we have the carrot. In our world, TV and social media are our carrot, meant to distract us from the stick of riot police and standing armies that imperialistically oppress the world. In cyclically abusive relationships, the carrot and stick represent traumatic bonding.

Those who “come inside” to “see the show” are the industrial working class, for they are told to “leave [their] hammers at the box” before going in. Among the images to see are violent, shocking ones, meant in this way to be entertaining and “spectacular”: namely, “rows of bishops’ heads in jars,” and a terrorist’s car bomb. The same goes for the “tears for you to see.”

There are entertaining horrors, but also entertaining pleasures, like the stripper. Of course, for many, the opium of the people is the most entertaining spectacle of all, hence they “pull Jesus from a hat.”

After all of this, there’s an instrumental section leading to the end of Side One of the LP. Being one of the pre-eminent progressive rock bands of the 1970s, ELP were always known for showing off their virtuosity as musicians, even to the point of annoying music critics, who accused them of egotism run rampant. For ELP to show off in this way, however, for the sake of putting on “a most amazing show,” is perfectly appropriate. In fact, Lake does some extended lead guitar soloing here, something he did only sparingly on previous ELP albums.

Side One ends with a fading-out of Emerson playing a repeated synth note in A-flat, accompanied by Palmer shaking a tambourine. This same music fades in to begin Side Two. There are CD versions of this music played without the fading out and in, giving an uninterrupted 1st Impression, but the long instrumental passage leading up to the famous “Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends,” still gives us the feeling that this is a distinct part two…or ‘part three,’ as I’d have it.

Note the ecological destruction alluded to in the line, “There behind the glass stands a real blade of glass.” While Lake is singing this line, Emerson comes in with the organ, playing that cheerful, ‘carnival’ music. In this we hear the stark contrast of the happy music masking the evil reality depicted in the lyrics of having wiped out almost all the plant life on the planet…and this horror is presented as a form of entertainment, or a museum piece.

In today’s world, the debate surrounding climate change could be seen as a form of entertainment, in that it may amuse many of us to watch and hear the heated, angry arguing over the controversy as to whether global warming is real or a myth. We go from “England’s green and pleasant land” to “a real blade of grass” over the space of one side of an LP.

So we can see how the theme of the good-vs-evil duality manifests itself as a mask in “Jerusalem” and “Karn Evil 9.” The piety and patriotism of the first track masks the “dark Satanic mills,” as discussed above, and the enjoyment of “the show,” the Karn of the carnival, its carnality, masks the Evil.

That the show is “guaranteed to blow your head apart,” in the context I just described, can thus have a dual meaning: good in that the show will impress and amaze us, and bad in that its mesmerizing effect will take away our ability to think independently. That we’ll “get [our] money’s worth” sounds like a capitalist hard-sell, and that “it’s rock and roll” suggests the decadence of capitalism (i.e., rock stars making huge profits while posturing as edgy, anti-establishment social rebels).

The decadence of rock is then aptly demonstrated by more instrumental showing-off, in this way by an organ solo by Emerson. This has to be one of the greatest organ solos in the history of art rock, ranking right up there with Rick Wakeman‘s organ solo on Yes‘s “Roundabout.” These solos almost compel fans to play ‘air organ,’ they’re so good.

Emerson’s organ playing here, as is the case with his piano playing in the 2nd Impression, is so good that it makes all the more tragic his suicide in 2016, from a gunshot wound to the head. Nerve damage in his right hand, starting in 1993, was hampering his playing; it had abated by 2002, but in 2016 he was struggling with focal dystonia, something he did not dare discuss publicly for obvious, professional reasons. Drinking and depression exacerbated the problem, and anxiety over performing badly, disappointing fans, pushed him over the edge, especially when internet trolls made mean comments about his playing. Lake died later the same year.

Speaking of Lake, after Emerson’s organ solo, he replays most of the written part of his guitar solo from Side One, followed by some extrovert drumming by Palmer and more verses. More references to decadence are made, these times of a sexual sort, when Lake sings of a “gypsy queen in a glaze of vaseline,” reminding us of the stripper from Side One; then there’s “a sight to make you drool–seven virgins and a mule.”

“The show” of the 1st Impression ends fittingly with more bombast, pomp, and instrumental showing off, particularly by Emerson playing fast notes on the synth, and by Palmer not only on the drums but also on the tympani.

VII: Karn Evil 9, 2nd Impression

This delightful instrumental has to be the creative zenith of the entire album, with “Toccata” and the 1st Impression just under it. Here, Emerson is held back by neither the need to play someone else’s notes, nor by a need to conform to listeners’ expectations, whether in the mainstream pop world, nor in that of what had by 1973 already become prog rock clichés. Here, we have pure Emerson as composer and artist, unfettered by anything.

Here‘s a link to the piece, with a transcribed score for piano and bass.

The piece begins with a long, twisting and turning piano riff, jazzy in style and yet, in the context of being sonata-like in structure, the ‘exposition,’ as it were. Palmer plays some fast, tricky drum licks before Emerson comes in as described, backed by Palmer and Lake on the bass. The music is modulating all over the place, and while most of it’s in 4/4, towards the end there’s a shift to a bar of 2/4, then two bars in 5/16, and a bar of 7/16 before returning to 4/4.

That long and winding piano riff is repeated, then there are two bars in 3/4, one in 12/16, one in 3/8, and one in 7/8 before going back to 4/4. After a while, we hear octaves on the right hand of the piano, eighth notes and sixteenth notes in C-sharp, then three sixteenth notes in E, then an eighth note in B, while on the left hand (doubled by Lake on the bass), instead of the E and B, it’s D and G respectively.

This set of notes is heard twice, leading into a section with a Latin American rhythm. Over this rhythm, Emerson plays a synthesizer solo that imitates the timbre of a steelpan. Palmer is shaking maracas and tapping claves in the background.

After this, a complicated riff is heard in alternating bars of 4/4 and 7/8 time, in the latter of which we hear high octaves in C-sharp on the right hand of the piano, thirds going up and down in C-sharp/E-sharp and D/F-sharp on the left hand, and C-sharp and D-natural on the bass. Next, a bar in 7/16, one in 9/16, and a 4/4 piano riff of high octaves in G-sharp, then C-sharp on the right hand of the piano, with the left hand playing second-inversion triads of E-natural/A-natural/C-natural to the right-hand G-sharp octaves, and left hand second-inversion triads of G-sharp/D-natural/F-natural to the right-hand C-sharp octaves.

The dissonance of these last few chords is the most tension we hear in this beginning fast section of the 2nd Impression, leading into the eerie tension of the slow middle section. Prior to this tense moment, the music has been largely upbeat and even merry. This contrast between cheerful and dark is once again a reflection of the good-vs-evil duality of “Karn Evil 9,” and of Brain Salad Surgery as a whole. Surface pleasures mask inner evils, as noted on previous tracks. The beginning fast section ends on a chord of C-sharp major.

While the beginning and ending fast sections are light and jazzy, the slow middle section is essentially like twentieth-century classical music in its use of eerie, atmospheric, dense chords, which are a kind of theme-and-variations form based on a harmonic progression in E minor, A minor, and C minor, as expanded tonality. As I said above, this softer music represents the hidden plotting and scheming behind the extrovert fun and games of the faster parts.

In this middle section, we hear Emerson’s expressive use of softer piano dynamics. Before, we heard his dabbling in jazz; now, we hear his mastery of classical technique.

Eerie, ambient, dense chords of G-sharp/D/E/A-sharp and F-natural/D/G-sharp/E are heard on the piano, and Lake follows with a line of A-sharp, G-sharp, F-natural, and E on the bass. These are heard twice, then Emerson plays intervals of G-sharp/E and F-natural/D, which Lake follows with a line of D, E, F-natural, G-natural, and A. This has all been in 6/4.

The time switches to 4/4, and Palmer is playing woodblocks behind the piano and bass, which have been playing harmonic variations of the chords and intervals I described above. At one point during this passage, Lake plays a descending chromatic line from E to A. Now in A minor, Emerson’s playing will include ascending and descending octaves in A, B, C-natural, and C-sharp, then C-natural, B, B-flat, and A; the first three of both sets of notes are triplets, and the second set of triplets are backed with a triplet roll on a kettledrum by Palmer, who’s still playing those woodblocks, like a ticking clock…ninety seconds to midnight (<<<more on this later).

The fast third section comes in next; it starts in 3/8 time, with Emerson playing a lot of fast triplets in the right hand. Then a bar of 4/8, back to 3/8 for four bars, a bar in 9/8, four more bars of 3/8, then 4/4, 4/8, 7/8, and a few more time changes until an improvisatory passage in 4/4.

In the middle of this passage, there’s a brief reprise of those dissonant chords heard just before the end of the fast first section, though notated in the transcription (YouTube link above, at about 6:16) with the enharmonic notes of D-flat octaves in the right hand, and a second-inversion triad of A-flat/D-natural/F in the left hand.

Finally, the 2nd Impression ends with a recapitulation, if you will, of the twice-played ‘exposition’ of the beginning of the fast first section, that twisting and turning theme. It ends with octaves in both hands of F-sharp on the piano, which Lake doubles on the bass.

VIII: Karn Evil 9, 3rd Impression

The music we hear Lake singing to sounds very patriotic, with a harmonic progression that sounds, to be perfectly frank, rather trite with, for example, its ending in a suspension fourth resolving to the leading tone, being the third of the dominant chord in the cadence, then back to the tonic in a major key.

How such music ties in with the story, it seems to me, is that a gung-ho, nationalistic attitude is being appealed to as a solution to the dystopian class conflict as established in the 1st Impression–trite harmony thus corresponds to patriotism as a naïve attitude in politics. Furthermore, historically such a solution has tended to lead to fascism, which in the context of this story can explain its ambiguous ending (more on that later).

Bourgeois liberal democracy gives the pretense of a free society, full of choice and pleasures, hence “the show” of the 1st Impression. But when class conflict gets too strained, as can be felt in the lyrics and music before the displays of the show, and the ruling class feels threatened by a proletarian uprising, they resort to fascism in order to maintain power, typically seducing the masses with talk of nationalism and patriotism, as is felt here in the 3rd Impression.

Once again, we have the duality of good as a mask for evil. The soldiers think they’re fighting for their country, when really they’re just fighting for the capitalist class.

“Man alone, born of stone”, is hard-hearted in his alienation. He thus is “of steel,” he’d “pray and kneel” to political and religious authorities to get an illusory sense of identity, communal inclusion, and meaning in his otherwise empty life. Still, his life is full of pain: “fear…rattles in men’s ears and rears its hideous head.”

Could that “blade of compassion” be the same blade of grass, the one preserved piece of plant life, from the 1st Impression? Whatever it is, it’s been “kissed by countless kings, whose jeweled trumpet words blind [men’s] sight.” Heads of state pretend to care about us, kissing compassion, as it were, and we’re blinded by the “jeweled trumpet words” of their demagoguery and false promises, believing their lies are truth.

We thought our civilization would last forever: “walls that no man thought would fall, the altars of the just, crushed…” Because of these disappointments, war must come, replacing the hope of revolution.

The relevance of the lyrics of the 3rd Impression to our world in the 2020s can be seen in not only the wish to fight the oppressive political system, but also in fascism’s co-opting of the common man to fight wars among nations instead of rising up in revolution against the ruling class, as well as how computers acting in their own right and supplanting humanity sounds like today’s rise of AI, and the fears many of us have about such technology replacing us in the working world and thus leaving us in abject poverty.

Accordingly, we sense hostility between man and machine (which, recall, is one of the main forms of the duality theme in Brain Salad Surgery–remember Giger’s ‘biomechanical’ album cover) in the bridge of the ship when the computer, voiced electronically by Emerson, says, “DANGER!…STRANGER! LOAD YOUR PROGRAM. I AM YOURSELF.” Indeed, our technology, in its quest to be dominant, is a reflection of ourselves.

All of these issues are relevant to our times in that we’ve seen these phenomena: a resurgence of fascist tendencies in many political movements in the world (those of Trump, Ukraine, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, etc.); such leftist struggles as Occupy Wall Street, opposition to the Gaza genocide, BLM, etc.; and the double-edged sword of AI (in a socialist context, where production is for providing for everybody’s needs, it can liberate us all; but in a capitalist context, it can throw millions of people out of work and thus subject us to homelessness, starvation, and death). Finally, a “nuclear dawn” in our time is the danger of such an armageddon between the US/NATO on one side, and Russia and China on the other.

All of what has come so far in the lyrics is a lead-up to war, culminating with “let the maps of war be drawn.” So the instrumental break, including a keyboard solo, all of it lasting for almost five minutes, represents the war.

There have been three interpretations of the outcome of the war. The first is that man has won, with Lake singing, “Rejoice! Glory is ours! Our young men have not died in vain.” Note the patriotic themes heard not only during the beginning of the middle ‘war’ section, but also during the beginning of this ‘victory.’

Perhaps man has deceived himself, though, in this supposed victory. Is the patriotic music a masking of an insidious evil, that of a surreptitious takeover of the computers? That they have won over man is the second interpretation of the war’s outcome. Such a possibility is suggested when the computer says to the “PRIMITIVE! LIMITED!” humans, “NEGATIVE!…I LET YOU LIVE.” In other words, the superior computers spared the defeated humans’ lives so they could see how inferior they are to their real victors. After all, “the tapes have recorded [the] names” of all the fallen men (suggestive not only of such things as the televising of the carnage of the Vietnam War, but also the deaths of so many in such places as Gaza today, all recorded on cellphones).

The third interpretation of the war’s outcome, as Sinfield–who collaborated with Lake on the lyrics of the 3rd Impression–would have us understand, is that man and the computers won together in a war against a shared enemy, but the computers have since taken control over man. Such an interpretation is the one most consistent with the lyrics, taking account of all of them.

IX: Conclusion

Such an interpretation is also conducive to the relevance of “Karn Evil 9” (and of Brain Salad Surgery as a whole) to our times in the 2020s. Class war was diverted from by fascism, not just in the period between the two world wars, but since both of them, too, in such forms as Operation Paperclip, with ex-Nazis working in the American and West German governments (including in NASA and NATO), in Operation Gladio, and in Western support for Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers all the way from the end of WWII to the present.

The war of the middle section of the 3rd Impression can thus be interpreted as the Cold War, with a preoccupation against “Un-American” activities as represented in the music by the patriotic theme. The perceived human victory would today be seen as the “end of history,” while the subsequent computer takeover can be seen to represent all of the technological advances of the three decades following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, including the online invasions of our privacy, AI threatening to take over many of our jobs, and the prospect of cashless societies making us helpless handlers of our cellphones.

So once again, the duality of good–for example, the convenience of new technologies–masks the evil of the hegemony of those technologies, just as the ‘good’ of patriotism masks the evil of fascism. In the same way, the piety and patriotism of “Jerusalem” mask the “dark Satanic mills,” and the erotic pleasure of ‘brain salad surgery’ and of “the show” masks the pain of “the helpless and the refugee.”

Contradiction and duality are at the heart of everything in life; this is what makes Brain Salad Surgery so thematically universal.