YMMV / In the Court of the Crimson King

• Awesome Music: The entire album. There's a reason it's probably the single most influential album in the history of Progressive Rock.
• Epic Riff: "21st Century Schizoid Man."
• Ending Fatigue: "Moonchild" sometimes gets this, with its ten minute closing section of ambient instrumental improvisation (subtitled "The Illusion"). It's widely acknowledged to be the only weak spot on an otherwise flawless album, to the degree where the Steven Wilson remix shaves two minutes off for the sake of brevity (the full-length song is still included as a bonus track).
• Harsher in Hindsight: "21st Century Schizoid Man"... it came true. As of The New '10s — a time period already known for intense sectarian violence worldwide, rampant paranoia in the wake of the NSA Spying Scandal, and unfettered materialism — the whole song is like a documentary.
  • "Epitaph" gets quite a bit of this too.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The album cover, to some extent.
    • It is sometimes used to mock how many modern record collectors have a copy of a specific "obscure" album, with the above usually referred by the Vinyl Jerk subreddit as the "Screamy Red Man" album.
  • Uploading the album to YouTube under different titles in an attempt to circumvent Robert Fripp constantly taking down said uploads has become one. Typically it's described as either NOT being the album, or being a similarly named nonexistent album by another band.
• Nightmare Fuel: Much of the album could qualify, due to its very experimental sound and nightmarish, dystopian lyrics. Then there's the cover art.
• Tear Jerker: "Epitaph" and the song portion of "Moonchild."
• Vindicated by History: Kind of. Critical reception at the time was mixed (Robert Christgau infamously called it "ersatz shit", but he hates nearly anything related to Progressive Rock), but it's now very widely acclaimed. It was never anywhere close to universally critically maligned, though.

---