Hitless Hit Album: This album didn't score any hits, yet it was a major bestseller among rock fans and a Cult Classic to this day.
Rarely Performed Song: While "21st Century Schizoid Man" has been a staple of the band's live performances throughout most of their history, it was conspicuously left out of their setlists during the 1980s, in part due to Robert Fripp's desire to avoid anchoring the group to the past (which itself was a byproduct of his discontent with what he saw as genre-wide artistic stagnation during the twilight of Progressive Rock's heyday in the '70s). "The King Crimson Barber Shop", a joke song included as a bonus track on the 2001 remaster of Three of a Perfect Pair, riffs on this with the lines "We don't do '21st Century Schizoid Man', but we're the King Crimson band."
King Crimson is the name of the Stand of the main villain of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind, and has a sub-stand named after Epitaph. "21st Century Schizoid Man" would also be an accurate descriptor for said villain since Part 5 was the first one to take place in the new millennium and he has two personalities.
King Crimson in JoJo is also known for having an extremely menacing face, which may or may not be a reference to the album's rather infamous cover.
Aesop Rock sampled the instrumental bits of the first half of the song on "Kill 'Em All".
In The Venture Brothers, this is one of the albums Rusty owns in his prog rock collection, although he refuses to show it to Hank.
You are not ready to step into the court of the Crimson King just yet.
Short-Lived, Big Impact: Despite the fact that, due to his untimely death, Barry Godber never designed anything else in his life, the album cover has become one of the most recognizable ones in its field.
Also applies to the lineup on this album, who only lasted long enough to record this album but nevertheless influenced many later bands (and helped give rise to Emerson, Lake & Palmer).
Trope Codifier: The album codified a number of elements that become common with Progressive Rock: lavish cover art, classical and jazz influences, and long songs broken up into movements with their own subtitles. The album also marked the emergence of prog-rock as a genre distinct from Psychedelic Rock.
From the film:
Hostility on the Set: Downplayed and to a certain extent played for laughs, but present. Drummer Jeremy Stacey observes to director Toby Amies that even though Fripp asked Amies to make the film in the first place, he tended to get rather annoyed whenever Amies actually showed with a camera and started interviewing people. At one point, after a gig, a very testy Fripp informs Amies that, because he spent so much of the previous evening talking on camera for the film, he missed doing his regular guitar practice, so that his performance in the show that evening had been subpar. In spite of all this, Fripp obviously allowed the film to come out and wrote a warm note in the DVD booklet, so he can't hate it.
Posthumous Credit: Bill Rieflin gets one of these, having died while the film was in post-production.
Trolling Creator: Fripp can come across a bit like this, delighting in mocking the director of the film that he asked to be made.
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