Epitaph

This song title as well as the lyrics of this song refer to the message that is displayed on a gravestone. In this song, the singer is facing a struggle and fears that his epitaph will be "confusion." Greg Lake, who was the bass player with the group for the In the Court of The Crimson King album (his only album with the band, as he left to form Emerson, Lake & Palmer), explained: "'Epitaph' is basically a song about looking with confusion upon a world gone mad. King Crimson had a strange ability to write about the future in an extremely prophetic way and the messages this song contains are even more relative today than they were when the song was originally written."

Pete Sinfield sometimes wrote visionary lyrics that at the end of the '60s were common in bands like King Crimson who were doing progressive rock. LSD was trendy and many songwriters went through it, some more than others. Sinfield is apocalyptical in his writings, just like many other artists who were also seeing gurus (very trendy by then too). People had a deep curiosity and the mind had just been discovered and marketed: "The only way out is inside" said Timothy Leary. Vietnam was still on, there was an inner war in society, a big generation gap. Fear was in the air sometimes too. So take mind-expanding drugs, the growing power of the media, revolved and curious minds, gurus talking about how bad our society was doing, etc. and it reflects on many lyricist works, Sinfield as well. Bob Dylan was also very cryptic.