10 More Songs That Are Huge Outliers On Rock Albums

Though their heyday as a recording act was in the early 1970s, King Crimson are still talked about with reverence to this very day.

Kanye West even borrowed one of their songs for his track Power. Sure, it led to a big lawsuit where it was claimed that West used the sample without permission, but still. 

The song in question was 21st Century Schizoid Man, easily Crimson’s best-known release, even though it was the very first track on their very first album. In the Court of the Crimson King from 1969 was a big success, partly off the back of its opener, which is strange because it doesn’t sound like anything else on there. 

21st Century etc. etc. is fast and frenetic, as if to embody the mind of someone on the edge, as the title implies. The other four songs on the record (yes, it’s another one of those albums) are much slower and a lot less panicked. Themes of modern struggles are still present, but they are formatted in a very different way.

Kanye would have had struggled mightily fitting those into a hip-hop song.