NY3 & Fripp: The Most Metal Song You’ll Ever Hear & It’s Not Metal

That riff drops with more atomic weight than the entire history of Nordic Death Metal and Slayer’s complete canon put together. The meter is probably pi and the violent drumming, by Narada Michael Walden, out Keith Moons Keith Moon. And the “lyrics?” What’s edgier and more metal and punk than a life-changing domestic squabble where the mother scales the depths of imagination for every pissy, bigoted, and heart-shatteringly poison-tipped arrow she can spew? (See the lyrics here.)

F--k all that devil worship crap – it’s kid’s stuff. For trauma, Satan can’t compete with an alcoholic step-mother.

This from a guy who claims guitar-based music bored him.

In 1974 he told Guitar Player that “virtually nothing interests me about the guitar.” He said most guitar music is boring. He also thought the guitar bored Jimi Hendrix and for both the guitar is only a medium used for transmitting into the universe, those metal strings being a medium that gives them a language for speaking. (Hear Fripp’s story of Hendrix going fanboy on him in 1969.)

Okay, back to that riff. He’s essentially walking down some scale based on extraterrestrial angularities and battered intervals the ear doesn’t often get exposed to. Part of his secret is the alternative tuning: Fripp invented his own tuning called the New Standard Tuning (NST). Strings are tuned to fifths, except for the top – G-C-G-D-A-E-G – and even if you know nothing and care even less about guitar technique, your ears will detect the differences instantly. It drops your lobes into another universe.

Add to this a picking style he calls perpetuum mobile (perpetual motion) which takes short melody figures and chains them together in brutally fast lines, a mashup of minimalist repeated figures, avant jazz runs, and atonal composers like Milton Babbitt and Anton Webern.

Fripp has played versions of this run over the years, going back. (See the Lark’s Tongue in Aspic III version below.) What he does on NY3 is give that sound its highest purpose. For me, it’s the culmination of what all those avant garde academy types were aiming at. Fripp gives us something we can use – utter agitated pleasure.



And more fripperies: