10 Rap Albums That Every Rock Fan Should Listen To
4. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West
As the 2010's started, Kanye West did a pretty good job at painting himself as the villain of the music industry. After already having a fiasco during the relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina, his interruption of Taylor Swift at the MTV Awards led to the entire world to turn against him. While Taylor may have turned a corner in her musical career, Kanye fled to Hawaii, waiting for the right moment to strike.
When we finally got ahold of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, this was the most maximalist thing that Ye had ever created. Being more in the vein of prog rock than most of his other tracks, Kanye takes every single heavy rock sample he can think of and throws it into the mix, whether it's reinterpreting an old spiritual chant on POWER or quoting Black Sabbath directly on the song Hell of a Life.
Never has a hip hop album benefited more from an electric guitar either, with Mike Dean showing some impressive chops behind the fretboard. While not really being a hip hop album through and through, you're always aware of the mad genius at the heart of everything here. Yeah, we are all aware about how much Ye likes to put himself on a pedestal for being the greatest to ever spit a verse, but on this one album, he confirmed his place up there with some of the greatest of all time, rap or otherwise.