10 2000s Albums That Are A Lot Better Than You Remember

Ever since the turn of the 2010's, the music industry has done its due diligence to make Kanye West a god-like figure in the music industry with the College Dropout and Graduation, which will not be making this list. The point is...well...you know how good those tracks are, so why waste time rehashing things here? No, if you want to get the Kanye album that people take for granted, you need to go back to the one everyone initially hated.

Coming off of the victory lap of Graduation, West was given a heavy blow when he lost his mother months into the tour cycle. Looking to expel his emotional demons on record, 808s & Heartbreak is a far more intimate look at West's psyche, where he refrains from rapping and relies on Auto-tune throughout the whole thing. As much as people were willing to burn Ye at the stake for this, the idea of this happening at all was a gamechanger.

Ever since this album's release, we've been seeing plenty of artists take Ye's formula here and apply it to their own songs, from the Weeknd to even the late Michael Jackson praising it in the waning years of his life. And c'mon...would we even have an artist like Drake if not for this album alone? Bringing as many new ideas to the table as emotional resonance, 808s & Heartbreak is probably the closest we will ever get to see Kanye as a vulnerable presence.