10 Most Inaccessible But Ultimately Rewarding Albums Ever

7. Kanye West - Yeezus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SoKFycTmVU In this day and age many artists like to play it safe when it comes to their musical ambitions and aspirations for fear of their position being lost in the sea of artists flooding the industry in this digital era. Kanye West opted for a radical change in relation to this and released his most bold and daring work to date in 2013, the insanely uncompromising Yeezus. Comparisons to more underground rap acts like Death Grips can certainly be heard but it's his wide mainstream exposure that just makes the record even more risque and shocking because of who it is and how oblivious the record sounds to any preconceptions that listeners might have going into it. It's more than just your traditional rap album, the music on Yeezus is carefully selected with every note packing a punch. In fact if anything is lacking on this brave artistic quest it is lyrically with West contradicting himself at several instances and his tendency to fall back into his materialistic and misogynistic non sequiters. Despite this the album just oozes superlatives musically; from the laser cutting, saw-tooth driven 'On Sight' to the dank minimalism of 'New Slaves', the latter being a particular highlight and an example of the intense restraint heard throughout this futuristic, voyeuristic journey into the mind of a seemingly deluded madman. As polarizing as West is, this album only polarized the public more with people either hating it or loving it but that's what a lot of great art does. It makes no apologies for its abandonment of traditional rap and hip-hop with its impenetrable, skin-crawling obliqueness, instead it focuses on forging a new path in the scene and does so successfully. Yeezus isn't perfect by any means (though undoubtedly part of its charm) but it is artistic, stylistic and an impassioned statement of intent from someone with a massive chip on his shoulder.