The first time I heard this song was after I bought Discipline on vinyl. I believe at the time I had only heard Frame by Frame from the album, so I was going into it with very little knowledge. Eventually Discipline became one of my favorite albums, but the first time I listened to it was a different experience. Indiscipline is such a jarring song on first listen, it doesn’t feel “musical” at all. I actually wrote a speech about this song in my junior year of high school (the prompt was “intemperance”):

As you may be able to tell from the shirt I wear, one of my favorite King Crimson albums is their 1981 release Discipline. However, my favorite song from the album isn’t the title track, as I much prefer the song that bookends the first side of the record, “Indiscipline.” While “Discipline” does have hypnotic melodies, it lacks in variety; every instrument is restrained to never take center stage, and they all play mostly the same things throughout the length of the song, excluding some minor variations here and there. “Indiscipline,” meanwhile, throws all of that out the window. It alternates between slow, minimalist sections, consisting almost entirely of Adrian Belew’s singing — or maybe more accurately, talking — and a single, haunting bass note being repeated by Tony Levin on the Chapman Stick. But, without warning, it jumps into a chaotic instrumental break, where instead of every instrument taking equal parts harmoniously, they become unrestrained: Robert Fripp and Levin’s melody is overlaid with Bill Bruford’s many pounding drum fills, all the while Belew’s squealing lead guitar breaks out into frantic solos. The song progresses, and it only becomes more wild as it goes on. Most people, myself included, wouldn’t like it the first time they hear it. The structure is nothing that you would expect out of a typical song, the “singing” is anything but that, the instrumental breaks are so chaotic that you can barely tell what’s going on, and the energy changes so dramatically that it’s not something you could ever dance to in any way whatsoever. But, to quote the final lyric of the song that Belew yells out, “I like it.” It’s exactly what “Discipline” is not: It’s frantic, it’s fluctuating, it’s immoderate, it’s unrestrained; it’s intemperate. “Intemperance,” however, is a stigmatized word. Surely by lacking moderation and restraint, people who are “intemperate” are just the lawbreaking, unproductive delinquents of the world who indulge too much in alcohol, right? No, it doesn’t need to be, and King Crimson’s music is a perfect example of why that is the case. The headman of the band Robert Fripp even swore off drugs completely by this point in his career, choosing not to indulge in substances, but rather in music. And by taking the shackles off of his music creation, he constantly bred creativity, and took routes no other band would ever choose, or even imagine as a possibility. So do as Fripp did with King Crimson: Don’t just limit yourself to conventional ideas in creating new things or solving problems, be intemperate, and go beyond even the bounds of creativity itself. The only thing stopping you, after all, is yourself.

Admittedly, the last line of this speech is pretty cheesy, I just didn’t know how to wrap it up properly. I moreso regret that I was unable to play the song for the speech.