10 Albums That You Need To Listen To More Than Once
The Biggest Sleeper Hits.
Some of the best albums ever made tend to hook you in from the moment they come on. As much as people like to sit and dissect music, there's nothing wrong with a song that grabs you by the throat and demands that you pay attention from the minute it starts playing. Then again, not all albums are made to impress you like that.
Though these albums are also great in their own right, they've been known to be more of a sit than your average greatest hits kind of album. Hell, some of these albums might sound like one of the most pretentious things you've ever heard on first listen, only to grow on you like a fungus with every respective spin that you give it. Whereas you get the gist of certain albums relatively quickly, these are the albums that take you on a journey that you didn't even know you were prepared to take.
This isn't a one time thing either, with most people picking up on the quality of these albums either well after the fact or after sitting with it for a long while. Things might sound great in the moment, but in terms of quality music, the only deciding factor as to whether something stands out or not comes with the passage of time.
10. 808s And Heartbreak - Kanye West
In the years following the College Dropout, it's safe to say that most hip hop fans have cooled out on how innovative Kanye West's arrival was. Although the idea of a non-threatening rapper was certainly a change of pace around 2004, you can just as easily find rappers without a dangerous rap sheet all across Soundcloud today. Now, if you wanted to annoy hip hop fans, you needed to make a switch that people would remember.
Ahead of his album 808s and Heartbreak, West's dissolved 18-month engagement to Alexis Phifer and his mother's death played into the cold and chilling atmosphere of every track, which became a big turn-off for the people expecting something energetic in the vein of Graduation. There was also the fact that this was West's first hip hop album where he didn't even rap, sticking to Auto-tuned crooning for most of the record.
As much as this kind of drastic shift seemed off at the time, it ended up being the catalyst for the second wind of Kanye's career. Aside from being the icebreaker before My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, this cold and calculated approach has grown on the hip hop community better than anything else since, being the blueprint for everyone from Drake to the Weeknd. Even though Kanye is far from the genius that he makes himself out to be, he was at the very least ahead of the curve here.