10 Albums That Are Difficult To Listen To
5. White Light/White Heat - The Velvet Underground
Most people accustomed to garage rock have been used to some more lofi productions in their time. After all, having someone like the Ramones or even the Stooges put together in a cleaner studio package almost feels wrong when you hear what the original versions of their songs sound like. It's meant to be rough around the edges, but White Light/White Heat is where it starts getting too noisy for anyone to handle.
For anyone even thinking about getting into lofi music, don't make this your starting point, with most of the instruments sounding like they're being played out of an amplifier with a broken speaker. Even the vocals of this album aren't properly mixed, with songs like Lady Godiva's Operation having Lou Reed's performance overtaking the rest of the band in spots. Though this could just be chalked up to shoddy mixing, what if you knew that it was meant to sound like this?
Though the Velvet Underground's first record with Nico was already miles better than this from a production standpoint, this was meant to be far more abrasive than anything that came before, with Sister Ray becoming one of the most raucous things to come out of the Love Generation of rock and roll. As much as this can feel like sandpaper against your eardrums at points, the next generations of noise rock and post punk have used this album as their bible for years.