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Given the overwhelming amount of music that comes out every year, it’s no surprise that not every release hits its mark. More often than not, albums get rejected—shoved off toward dollar bins, used CD racks, and the dustiest corners of iPods and hard drives. That's not just a fate reserved for full-lengths from unknowns, either. It happens to music's superstars, too.
But such dismissals are not always just. Many unsung masterpieces get passed over upon first impression. This is usually because of fan indifference, poor critical reception, lack of record label support, bad timing, or some combination of all of those factors. It's the reason why certain records from artists as disparate as Cam'ron and The Beatles are still considered fails, even though they're actually pretty great.
It's time to correct some of those misconceptions. Here's a look at 50 Albums That Were Unfairly Hated On.
Written by Daniel Margolis
50. Cam'ron, Crime Pays (2009)
In 2006, Cam’ron, the clown prince of absurd verses that somehow sell millions, put out his shaky fifth album Killa Season, which was launched via a beef with Jay-Z that announced at a press conference at which he pronounced he had pictures of Jigga wearing sandals.
Following this, he disappeared for three years, during which time even his Diplomats cronies abandoned him (you know the world is on its ass when Dipset's Jim Jones turns his back on Cam’ron). Then, in 2009, Cam suddenly popped back up with Crime Pays, which put him back on the map.
“Get It In Ohio” is an awesome drug rap exploring the ins and outs of acquiring product in the Rust Belt; definitely a new angle on well-worn territory (choice line: “Columbus to ‘Nati, them towns I raped ‘em/Few clowns was hating/Move my pounds to Dayton/And in Akron my niggas they would throw things/Not King James, these were coke kings”).
Even better, the brilliant “My Job” sees Cam rapping his first verse from the perspective of “the everyday working woman” and the second from the perspective of her deadbeat boyfriend. A platinum rapper had managed to cut a track entirely relatable to any working stiff—a rare feat.
49. Kiss, Music From "The Elder" (1981)
As the 1980s began, Kiss found itself at a crossroads. Original drummer Peter Criss had left after the band’s last album, Unmasked, tanked and Kiss was finding more success touring abroad than in America. It briefly considered recording a straight-ahead hard rock album as a return to form before deciding instead to hire Bob Ezrin—co-producer of Pink Floyd’s The Wall—to assist in recording (in secret) a concept album, Music From “The Elder,” which tells the story of a young boy’s transformation into a hero in a poorly defined fantasy world.
It’s impossible to overstate how hated the results were. When Kiss’ management and record company finally heard it they were shocked (their business manager refused to allow his company’s name to appear on the jacket). Lead guitarist Ace Frehley quit the band in frustration—he later described his departure as Kiss’ “musical vasectomy.”
Ezrin attributed his work on the album to the effects of his addiction to cocaine. Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons eventually admitted Elder was a mistake. Not surprisingly, it sold so poorly that Kiss didn’t even tour behind it and have rarely performed any of its material live.
But Music From “The Elder” is actually pretty good. In attempting what it considered serious material, Kiss sounds fresher than they ever could have on another batch of party anthems, and the inclusion of orchestration, searching instrumental passages, and dialogue gives the album an epic scope.
Coked-up or not, Ezrin’s prior resume shows. This sounds like four idiots from New York City attempting a Floyd album. It’s too bad Ace hated the album so much, as he turns in some stellar work, particularly the blistering solo on his only song here, “Dark Light.”
48. Elvis Costello, Goodbye Cruel World (1984)
You don’t need to look too far to find Elvis Costello’s ninth album’s biggest hater; Costello himself began the 1984 album Goodbye Cruel World’s 1995 Rykodisc reissue with the welcoming line, “Congratulations! You just bought the worst album of my career.”
He even repeated this line in its 2004 Rhino reissue, albeit reframed in the context of an anecdote about being asked to sign the album by an actor on the set of the 1999 movie 200 Cigarettes.
Thing is, these reissues made clear Goodbye Cruel World was not the disaster its creator figures it to be. The second disc of the Rhino reissue runs 26 tracks, presenting almost all of the original album’s 13 songs in demo form. Most of Goodbye Cruel World was slathered with the Yamaha DX7 keyboard, which, Costello wrote, “May as well date-stamp the album to an exact week in 1984,” which is to say it was doomed to not age well. Heard stripped of all that in the demos, the underlying quality of the songs themselves is evident; Costello’s considerable songwriting gifts had not left him.
A clear highlight is “The Comedians,” which was deep enough to be quoted by Alan Moore in his seminal graphic novel Watchmen. On the album proper, Costello gets a fun assist from Daryl Hall on “The Only Flame in Town.”
47. Britney Spears, Blackout (2007)
It seems safe to say that no album has ever been released surrounded by as much turmoil as Britney Spears’ fifth album Blackout. It was released in the midst of a bad couple years in which Spears divorced her widely loathed husband Kevin Federline, had her kids taken away, was photographed strapped to a gurney in the midst of a drug overdose, shaved her head, and bashed a paparazzi’s car with an umbrella.
Blackout was debuted via a shambolic performance of its lead single “Gimme More,” at the 2007 MTV VMAs and Spears didn’t do much more to promote the album. It sold well and reviews were kind but pointed out that Spears’ seemed barely there; that if the album was a success that was to be credited to her producers. Spears’ status as a major force in pop music was much diminished.
The thing is, rather than shy from all the chaos present in Spears’ life at the time, Blackout mines it expertly. On “Piece Of Me,” possibly the most honest song of her career, Spears sings “I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17 / Don’t matter if I step on the scene or sneak away to the Philippines / They’re still gonna put pictures of my derriere in the magazine” (the South Park episode in which celebrity reporters stalk Spears and gossip about her outfits even after she blows her head off with a shotgun comes to mind).
Timbaland protégé Danja’s “Hot As Ice” is a highlight, though the backup singers are doing most of the heavy lifting, while The Neptunes-produced Federline kiss-off “Why Should I Be Sad” is entertainingly revealing. Now that Spears has pulled off a sustained comeback, Blackout doesn’t look like such a disaster. More like just a dip in her catalog during a time in her life when she wasn’t able to focus on hit-making.
46. Steppenwolf, For Ladies Only (1971)
Steppenwolf’s sixth album, 1971’s For Ladies Only, was intended as a concept album reaching out in support of women and feminism, but this was misunderstood as nothing but typical hard rock sexism.
In retrospect, the album’s packaging did Steppenwolf no favors; the back cover has its members smirking while reading books like Please Breast Feed Your Baby and The Sensuous Woman and the gatefold is a picture of a car shaped and styled like a giant erect penis.
Rolling Stone wrote, “After listening to the album, I’m still not certain whether the fellows are for or against, but the songs within do little to dispel that feeling of steaming hostility toward women.” It’s hard to see how the reviewer could remain unsure after the album’s opening title track, the chorus of which declares, “For ladies only, too much waiting for too many years…half the world has been built on their tears.”
But misunderstood lyrics or not, For Ladies Only was another characteristic slab of idiosyncratic rock from Steppenwolf, the chief talent of which was its ability to pull off big moments so casually it didn’t appear to lose its cool. This was a great approach overall, but one that stumbled when trying to handle a topic as nuanced as women’s liberation.
45. Dee Dee King, Standing In The Spotlight (1989)
In 1989, the Ramones’ bassist Dee Dee Ramone, tired of cranking out punk anthems for 15 years, went hip-hop. Much to the chagrin of his band mates, he began playing the Ramones’ shows in hip-hop gear and even put out a rap single, “Funky Man,” and subsequent rap album, Standing In The Spotlight.
The Wikipedia entry for the record hyperbolically declares, “The album is sometimes considered to be one of the biggest failures in recording history.” Even today, a decade after Dee Dee’s death, Standing In The Spotlight is still getting ripped apart; The Onion A.V. Club published a long summation of it this year, calling it “a terrible idea wedded to an even worse execution.”
But for fans of the Ramones, ‘80s rap and public spectacles, Standing In The Spotlight is so much more than that. Ramone managed to rope in both Blondie’s prime mover Chris Stein on guitar and Debbie Harry herself to serve a hook girl. The two tracks with Harry—“Mashed Potato Time” and “Commotion In The Ocean”—expand on the genre fusion pioneered by the Fat Boys and the Beach Boys in combining hip-hop and oldies on the 1987 track “Wipe Out.”
Dee Dee also brought in Marky Ramone on drums; “Poor Little Rich Girl” is basically a Ramones song with rapped verses. The other Ramones may have hated Standing In The Spotlight but they came around to it eventually: The band re-recorded “The Crusher” for its final album ¡Adios Amigos!
44. Rihanna, Rated R (2009)
Rihanna’s first three albums evolved a simple, set formula; just have her sing—as well as she can—expertly crafted songs about partying and being in love. But then in February 2009, right before the two were set to perform at the Grammy Awards, Rihanna’s boyfriend Chris Brown assaulted her. Brown was charged with assault and making criminal threats the next month as Rihanna made her way into the studio to record her fourth album, which saw the singer suddenly shoved into a dark headspace.
She had no choice but to address the situation, which suddenly challenged Rihanna, unaccustomed to making music with a goal beyond packing dance floors and climbing the charts. The resulting album, Rated R, sold less than its predecessors and reviews were mixed. Spin pointed out the singer “has the sort of even-keeled, toneless voice that’s rarely expressive enough to convey fury” and the Washington Post asked, “Is she grappling with demons? Or projecting the image of a singer grappling with demons?”
But listening to the album a couple years removed from its celebrity news context, it reads as a sincere effort to let listeners into Rihanna’s real life, at least more than she had before. The music presents a dark air from the get-go as Rihanna addresses the elephant in the room straight-off, singing, “I’m such a fucking lady, you don’t have to be so afraid” on “Wait Your Turn.” And she sounds convincingly “Hard” with Young Jeezy.
If Rated R was Rihanna insincerely milking her circumstances at the time, at least she seems to have fun getting a little more thuggish than she’d otherwise have been allowed. When she finally drops the melodrama on “Rude Boy,” she scores a breezy, fun hit that could have easily been slotted on any of her previous albums.
What Rated R did, ultimately, was allow Rihanna to filter some darkness into her music, with thrilling results. Her next album, Loud, featured her singing about murder on “Man Down,” while last year’s "Talk That Talk" saw her repeating “We found love in a hopeless place” and riding that somewhat depressing declaration to another hit single.
43. Pharrell, In My Mind (2006)
Anyone who follows Tyler, the Creator’s Twitter feed is subject to a lot of jabber and nonsense but also a baffling running thread; anything the Neptunes do is considered on par with Moses handing down the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments. Tyler goes so far as to celebrate the anniversaries of the release dates of N.E.R.D’s four albums and of course Pharrell’s only solo album, In My Mind.
This is confusing because for most rap fans the Neptunes’ various albums are considered little more than vanity projects. Clearinghouses for the production team’s bad ideas that it wouldn’t dare try to charge commercial rappers and singers hundreds of thousands of dollars for.
There were high hopes surrounding Pharrell’s first album. Maybe he’d make his version of The Love Below (on Pharrell’s “Maybe,” released on Clipse’s We Got It 4 Cheap Volume 2 the previous year, he cited OutKast as one of his favorite groups over a cover of ‘Kast’s 1995 hit “Elevators (Me & You).")
But critics were dismissive; Rolling Stone said the album was “only so-so, offering a series of modestly tuneful, sometimes snoozy soul-pop-hip-hop songs,” while Entertainment Weekly complained “all of the songs have something in common: They’re not remotely catchy.” But divorced of the high expectations surrounding it, the album is actually solid. Pharrell mostly raps over crisp beats that shift textures constantly.
Meanwhile, Pharrell obviously brought his stuffed Rolodex to the studio, pulling in cameos from famous pals and past collaborators Gwen Stefani, Slim Thug, Snoop Dogg, Pusha T, Nelly, and Kanye West. It’s not worth throwing a party every July 25th, but In My Mind is a great place—to date, the only place—to get a complete picture of Pharrell as an artist.
42. Die Antwoord, Ten$ion (2012)
In 2009, Die Antwoord exploded on the scene with a self-released, download-only album called $O$ and a handful of videos capturing the white South African hip-hop collective, which is routinely offensive and sometimes baffling but undeniably compelling. Music blogs went nuts and the group became an Internet sensation.
Some speculated this was all a joke—that the group’s leader, Ninja, was nothing but a South African Ali G—but there wasn’t any stopping it, particularly once Die Antwoord hit the U.S. and the group began playing mind-bending shows in small clubs and at large festivals.
But the 2010 physical release of $O$ was a watered-down version of the original and by the time the group released its second album, Ten$Ion, this year, it seemed the joke wasn’t funny anymore; Die Antwoord was written off.
Pitchfork—one of the group’s earliest proponents—gave the album a 4.2, writing, “For a band so obsessed with its own self-consciously humorous image, Ten$ion in part fails because it feels so strangely humorless.” But if you go into Ten$ion not expecting laughs, the results are different.
Over 13 tracks, Ninja and his partner, irresistible half-pint female rapper Yolandi Visser, ride a steady stream of solid, complex beats, dropping customarily dated hip-hop references (Ninja: “No I don’t want to stop, collaborate, and listen”) and repeatedly boasting that Neill Blomkamp is going to make them stars.
It’s difficult to understand why this was so roundly rejected, but one explanation may be that Die Antwoord isn’t a group anyone goes to just for the music. With its strange, brilliant videos, it’s more of an audio-visual experience. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly this summer, Ninja suggested this himself, saying, “We feel like it’s a waste for us to make a song with no video.”
41. The Beatles, Yellow Submarine (1968)
The Beatles’ 1969 album Yellow Submarine is viewed—by critics, fans, and the band itself—as its least significant, weakest release. The B-side was made up of producer George Martin’s score for the film of the same name and as such was of little interest over the long term.
Of the six songs on the A-side, the charming but inconsequential title track had appeared on Revolver years earlier and “All You Need Is Love” had been released as a single and placed on the U.S. version of Magical Mystery Tour—plus it’s so vapid that once you hear it once you never need to hear it again.
But in between the two previously released songs comes a brilliant four song burst that wasn’t available anywhere else until The Beatles In Mono box set came out 40 years later. “All Together Now” is a characteristically whimsical sing-along by Paul McCartney, while Lennon’s “Hey Bulldog” boasts one of the best riffs he ever came up with.
Both songs were recorded specifically for the film. “Only A Northern Song” and “It’s All Too Much” were both Sgt. Pepper-era outtakes by George Harrison; the former a dark yet detached critique of the exploitive nature of music publishing, the latter a startling rock jam that drones on for over six minutes, the four Beatles augmented by four trumpets and a bass clarinet.
40. Jimi Hendrix, War Heroes (1972)
Jimi Hendrix is generally hailed for reinventing rock guitar but he also broke new ground in the field of posthumously released albums. He was truly the 2Pac of classic rock. At the time of his death in 1970 he’d been working on a new album for over two years, recording dozens of tracks.
These started to emerge the following year on the albums The Cry Of Love and Rainbow Bridge, both of which were well received despite their lack of direction from Hendrix. But his third posthumous release, 1972’s War Heroes, scraped the bottom of the barrel. The album sold poorly and critic Robert Christgau complained it was heavy on “filler.”
This is too bad, as the album showcases some clear highlights, including a blistering take on bluesman Elmore James’ “Bleeding Heart,” a great take on Hendrix’s “Highway Chile” and a rare studio version of his awesome cover of Swedish composer Bo Hansson’s “Tax Free,” a thrilling diversion at his live shows. Hendrix’s further posthumous albums were way worse, with session musicians hired to overdub the original instrumentation to make the material sound more contemporary.
39. Bob Dylan, Self Portrait (1970)
When Bob Dylan put out his tenth album in nine years in 1970, he was still at the center of a storm. Viewed as the voice of a generation in a dangerous, turbulent era, people were not prepared for the double-disc data-dump that was Self Portrait.
It contained over 73 minutes of material recorded over the course of a year—silly song sketches, live tracks, hokey covers, everything but the kitchen sink. Longtime Dylan scholar Greil Marcus’ Rolling Stone review of the record began, “What is this shit?”
There are a couple different theories on that. It was either Dylan’s attempt to throw people off by putting out an intentionally alienating album or a proto-version of Dylan’s long-running, vault-raiding Bootleg Series, meant to cash in on the then-current craze of bootlegging him.
It picks up some interesting live performances with the Band, including the best-ever version of “Quinn the Eskimo (Mighty Quinn),” which was later a hit for Manfred Mann. And the covers are mostly brilliant, with Dylan continuing to use the throaty singing voice he introduced on Nashville Skyline the year before but dropping it whenever it served the song to do so, practically admitting it was a put-on in the first place.
All of this may have been baffling at the time but today it’s invaluable; an overstuffed grab bag of Dylan getting strange as the decade he helped define—and came to loathe—drew to a close.
38. Creedence Clearwater Revival, Mardi Gras (1972)
For the first four years of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s career, its leader, lead singer and guitarist John Fogerty, was pressured by the other members to make CCR more democratic. Meaning the other members would participate in dictating artistic direction and writing songs. Fogerty refused, and the band enjoyed consistent, remarkable success.
Finally, in 1971, in advance of the band’s seventh and final album, Fogerty turned the tables. He said the band would function democratically, it would split songwriting responsibility equally.
The other members, Stu Cook and Doug Clifford (Fogerty’s brother Tom having recently quit, alienated by John’s strict control of the band), suddenly realized they’d been pushing for a huge mistake—that CCR would sink without enough of Fogerty’s material—and tried to persuade Fogerty to keep their arrangement the same.
But he doubled down, declaring that he would quit CCR if it didn’t go democratic, and, worse, that he refused to contribute anything to the other member’s songs beyond basic rhythm guitar. Basically he was rubbing in their face how central he was to the band’s success. The resulting album sold less than the band’s prior work, yielded no major hits and was poorly reviewed.
But it’s not bad, it sounds like a CCR album with all the high stakes removed and the only goal is turning in a sleepy, country rock record. Cook and Clifford’s ragged vocals make CCR sound more like other northern California bands of the era like Quicksilver Messenger Service or Country Joe & the Fish, and Fogerty sounds relaxed and reflective, particularly on “Someday Never Comes.” If CCR had to go out, this was an interesting way to do so.
37. DJ Shadow, The Outsider (2006)
In the first stretch of DJ Shadow’s career, the instrumental hip-hop producer made a name for himself by operating via a strict, simple rule; his music was created entirely via samples—no live instrumentation was allowed (his debut, Endtroducing, holds the Guinness World Record as the first album created entirely from samples).
Then, suddenly, on his third album The Outsider, Shadow decided to break this rule and rip into a big stack of drum machines and keyboards to create rap tracks aligned with the Bay Area’s then-trendy hyphy movement. That’s when all hell broke loose. The album was commercially unsuccessful, which would have been the case whether it was all samples or not, but Shadow fanboys and hip-hop purists flipped out on Internet comment boards and critics were equally displeased.
Okayplayer wrote, “Though any artist ought to be lauded for experimentation, Shadow veers too far from his base, and loses sight of what made his music so captivating in the first place.” Stylus gave the album a D: “He’s saying fuck you not only to new fans with The Outsider, but also to old ones.”
The real problem here, though, wasn’t so much Shadow’s new MO. It was how he’d assembled the album. His first two albums were carefully sequenced, with everything in its right place. The Outsider, though, felt like Shadow just threw everything he’d done for the last couple years on a disc (his next album, The Less You Know, The Better, suffered from the same problem).
But once you sort through it, there are some treasures here. On the hyphy tracks, “Three Freaks,” “Turf Dancing,” “Keep Em Close” and “Dats My Part,” Shadow nails the genre’s manic energy. Meanwhile, the David Banner feature “Seein’ Thangs” is one of the best Katrina dedications on wax. “Artifact (Instrumental)” rebuilds an anonymous punk jam into something otherworldly. And “The Tiger” sees Shadow back in the ethereal trip-hop territory fans evidently wanted him to remain firmly within.
36. RZA, Bobby Digital In Stereo (1998)
There was a great deal of expectation surrounding Wu-Tang Clan’s producer and de-facto leader RZA’s first album upon its release in 1998. By that time, five of the group’s other eight members had released solo albums, all of them classics that had moved forward what hip-hop was capable of, with RZA having had a hand in all of them.
So what did the Wu leader do when he finally found time to attend to his own album? He put out an oddball debut taking on the identity of a character named "Bobby Digital." RZA has never been the strongest rapper in the Wu and by the end of the ‘90s his style had gotten lazy, so 68 minutes of him on the mic was problematic.
Worse, the beats here have little in common with his sample-heavy work to date;. Instead they’re built with over a dozen keyboards. The results sold okay but there were some naysayers; Pitchfork gave it a 2.9 and called its opening track “the most annoying rap song of the year” (what an honor!).
Kool Keith, meanwhile, felt the whole Bobby Digital concept bit his style and teased in the booklet to his album First Come, First Served (itself released under a concept alias, Dr. Dooom) that his next album would be released as “Robbie Analog.”
What was missed in all this is that Bobby Digital In Stereo is brilliant in spots, particularly when RZA takes a break from rapping to bring in some other Wu members and farms out some production work, like on King Tech’s bubbling “Love Jones.”
Elsewhere, “Domestic Violence” proves to be an alarming highlight; Bobby gets cussed out at length by his girlfriend before finally shouting back “you don’t cook, you don’t clean, you don’t press my jeans” and U-God makes a cameo as a dude on the phone. Speaking to the Onion A.V. Club years later, RZA revealed his inspiration for all this strangeness was actually very simple; “It came from a really good bag of weed one day.”
35. Metallica, St. Anger (2003)
As anyone who’s seen the documentary Some Kind Of Monster knows, Metallica nearly tore itself apart recording its eight album, 2003’s St. Anger. They fought constantly and had difficulty agreeing on artistic direction. The band resorted to working with a performance coach and James Hetfield abandoned the sessions to go to rehab.
Metallica emerged from these trials better for them and did eventually release St. Anger, which sold millions and won a Grammy, but some were not impressed. Amusingly, Pitchfork gave the album a 0.4, and there was grumbling among the band’s longtime fans, who haven’t been universally happy with anything the band has done since the late ‘80s, with complaints mainly centered on the lack of guitar solos and St. Anger’s overall sound.
In retrospect, though, St. Anger is one of the most satisfying albums that Metallica has released in years. Right out the gate the band seems set to kill or kill itself trying, with Hetfield growling the great line “My lifestyle determines my deathstyle” on “Frantic.” The title track intriguingly alternates pummeling riffs with tuneful, quiet passages; proving the band still had a strong grasp of dynamics. “Sweet Amber” veers from a fast-paced, simple riff into a woozy chorus that calls to mind Dirt-era Alice In Chains.
The band’s next effort, Death Magnetic, saw Metallica continuing its return to form, but with less intriguing results, proving all the on-camera theatrics of its process here were beneficial.
34. Sly & the Family Stone, Small Talk (1974)
The wheels were coming off Sly & the Family Stone by the time it released its seventh album, Small Talk, in 1974. The band had been in decline for years, divided by drug abuse and Sly Stone’s behavior, equal parts dysfunctional and tyrannical.
The cover of the album featured a photo of Stone reveling in forced domesticity with his new wife, who would leave him three months later after Stone’s pitbull almost ate their young son (who cries annoyingly over Small Talk’s title track).
Reviews of the album were unenthusiastic and it failed to catch-on with record buyers. But the album has its moments and its fans, most notably the Beastie Boys, who lifted much of “Loose Booty” for the frenetic Paul’s Boutique cut “Shadrach” and then covered “Time For Livin’” as a punk song on Check Your Head.
33. Jay-Z, Kingdom Come (2006)
In 2003, Jay-Z released The Black Album, which was built around his supposed retirement as a solo artist. Over the next three years he was named president and CEO of Def Jam while maintaining a busy schedule of concerts and cameo appearances on other artist’s albums (including an entire album and tour with R. Kelly). Inevitably, Jay returned in 2006 with Kingdom Come, having created a set of circumstances guaranteeing expectations for the album would be massive. It sold, of course, but reviews were mixed and overall it was viewed as a disappointment.
In hindsight, though, it’s actually pretty good. Jay’s assessment of the state of the record industry and his own career at the top of the album is riveting. From there, he rips through three tracks from Just Blaze, the best of which, “Kingdom Come,” lifts a slice from Rick James’ “Super Freak” without calling MC Hammer to mind, a nice touch.
Hov gets uncharacteristically revealing about his personal life on “Lost One,” even appearing to explain that he planned to break-up with Beyonce (no one noticed, proof no one ever really listened to this album). Best of all is “Trouble,” where Jay just jumps on a beat and raps and raps and raps.
All of this looked even better once Jay-Z released The Blueprint 3. Pitchfork said, “The Blueprint 3 is so certainly Jay-Z’s weakest solo album, you’ll be tempted to wonder if Kingdom Come was somehow underrated.” It was.
32. G.O.O.D. Music, Cruel Summer (2012)
If this had been released by any other label, it would have been received as a solid rap compilation with perhaps a bit more big budget frills than expected. But this is the first comp from Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music and as such is judged against the high standards expected of West (largely set by West himself).
In early July of this year, Pitchfork published a round-up of speculation on what would be on the album over two months before its release, and West made headlines by merely tweeting the album cover a month later. All much more fuss than accompanied, say, Irv Gotti Presents: The Inc.
The album was finally released on Sept. 18, missing the album title’s self-imposed deadline by at least three months (West has a history of fucking up here; last year he threatened “Now I’m ‘bout to make them tuck they whole summer in” on an album, Watch The Throne, that didn’t even come out until August).
Reviews were lukewarm—after freaking out in anticipation, Pitchfork gave it a 6.5—but Cruel Summer’s actually not bad overall and provides a convenient one-stop shop for various tracks that made noise on rap radio and music blogs. A couple weeks after it came out, G.O.O.D. Music signee Q-Tip let slip that Cruel Summer may see a sequel called Cruel Winter, which will probably come out in mid-April—if at all.
31. Muddy Waters, Electric Mud (1968)
In the late 1960s, as white rock musicians were making a fortune off music that largely aped the sounds of American blues, some original bluesmen smartly recorded albums that courted this new audience.
Perhaps the most prominent example of this is Electric Mud, on which producer Marshall Chess put Muddy Waters in the studio with Charles Stepney, mastermind of the Rotary Connection and later Earth, Wind & Fire, and Pete Cosey, a monster of a guitarist who would go on to play with Miles Davis.
They cut eight tracks, mostly psychedelic reworkings of Waters’ classic songs and a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend The Night Together.” The result was Waters’ first album to hit the Billboard charts, but critics dismissed it as disingenuous. Waters agreed; he called it “dogshit,” complaining the album wasn’t proper blues and that his backing band lacked the equipment—large amplifiers, effects pedals, etc.—to play it live.
But other musicians picked up on it. Jimi Hendrix, who Electric Mud had sought to imitate, was a fan—and it’s even hailed as an early influence on hip-hop. Listening to it today, it’s difficult to believe this album even exists; it sounds like Muddy Waters backed by Blue Cheer—a combination too good to be true.
30. Aerosmith, Night in the Ruts (1979)
As the ‘70s drew to a close, Aerosmith was coming off of the incredible run of its first five albums and coming apart at the seams, mostly via drug abuse, divisive wives, and too much touring (Steven Tyler has said when he first saw This Is Spinal Tap, he missed every ounce of humor in it as it too closely mirrored the past decade of his life). The band began work on Night in the Ruts but was forced to stop midway through to go back on tour, during which time guitarist Joe Perry quit.
The remainder of the album (three out of its nine tracks) were then cobbled together with a substitute guitarist and sold okay but was savaged by critics. Reviewing the album unfavorably in Rolling Stone, David Fricke wrote, “The finest moments on Night in the Ruts sound like inspired outtakes from Rocks and Toys In The Attic” (as if that’s a diss). Robert Christgau said, “This opens with a promising song about their career called ‘No Surprize.’ Then they edge ever closer to the flash guitar, dull tempos, and stupid cover versions of heavy-metal orthodoxy. No surprise.”
Never mind, then, that “No Surprize” is a classic example of mid-tempo Aerosmith sleaze that takes off on the chorus and bridge. “Chiquita” recalls the Rolling Stones’ “Bitch” with its horn section-augmented riff. “Cheese Cake” is a tasty slide guitar workout from Perry. And “Three Mile Smile” sounds like Led Zeppelin circa Physical Graffiti and segues smoothly into a slow blues cover, “Reefer Head Woman,” another convincingly Zepp-like move.
Of the six songs with Perry here, only “Bone to Bone (Coney Island White Fish Boy)” fails to make an impression. Two of the three Perry-less tracks, meanwhile, are covers. The first, “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” is a terrible stab at the Shangri-Las’ song, while the second is an attempt at the Yardbirds’ “Think About It,” which was a bad idea given that the band had just lost its lead guitarist. Night In The Ruts’ last song, “Mia,” sees Tyler trying to pull off a ballad in the vein of “Dream On” and coming intriguingly close. All in all, this wasn’t a bad way to end the decade.
29. Leaders of the New School, T.I.M.E. (1993)
With their first album, 1991’s A Future Without A Past, Leaders of the New School established itself as a charming, energetic, talented unit worthy of its affiliation with (if not exactly membership in) the NYC rap collective Native Tongues. But fans checking in with the group for its second album, 1993’s T.I.M.E., were in for a surprise. Instead of more zany riffs on high school, LONS served up a half-baked sci-fi concept album.
Reviews were mixed (Allmusic said, “The group doesn’t entirely pull off this concept, and their point understandably becomes murky or downright opaque”) and not long after the album’s release the group broke up while making an appearance on Yo! MTV Raps.
It’s too bad, because it would have been interesting to see what LONS did after this transition into more mature-sounding material (instead, the group’s breakout star Busta Rhymes launched a solo career that has yielded steadily diminishing returns over the years while the other members simply faded into obscurity).
So what we’re left with is T.I.M.E., which does contain some real bangers, most notably “Classic Material,” an epic posse cut built on unlikely sample sources the Allman Brothers Band and Iron Butterfly, and “What’s Next,” a propulsive, verbose yet radio-ready jam that stood out in era stuffed with such moments.
28. Paul and Linda McCartney, Ram (1971)
Paul McCartney’s 1970 debut album McCartney was surprisingly slight, filled with song sketches, and just one big moment, “Maybe I’m Amazed,” viewed as befitting the former Beatles’ normally outsized ambitions, so the pressure was on for his second outing. When this emerged the following year, it was billed as a collaboration with his wife Linda, an American photographer with no musical credibility whatsoever.
Perhaps this was the reason it was hammered in the press. Jon Landau’s review of the album in Rolling Stone began by hyperbolically declaring, “Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far.” It didn’t help matters that the other three Beatles thought the album was stuffed full of diss tracks about them. The album’s opener “Too Many People” even prompted a response from Lennon, “How Do You Sleep?”
Listening to the album today, all this disdain seems insane. It’s one of McCartney’s best solo albums and one of the best by any former Beatle; showcasing well the varied stripes of his songwriting. His voice is in fine form and, what’s more, working with relatively unknown backing musicians, the instrumentation he arrives at is a continuation of his work with Beatles, demonstrating the significance of his role as de-facto musical director in his former band.
27. The Velvet Underground, Squeeze (1973)
When the Velvet Underground’s Peel Slowly And See box set, which compiled its entire discography, was released in 1995, the band’s fifth album, Squeeze, was nowhere near it. History has dismissed it as an illegitimate part of the VU story. The reason why? It was recorded by exactly none of the Velvets’ original members; instead the work of Doug Yule, who only joined the band for its third and fourth albums.
Yule was a sympathetic partner for the Velvet Underground’s primary songwriter Lou Reed (Reed even referred to him as “my brother Doug” in concert), but he was far from worthy of taking the reins of the band when it fell apart. Industry machinations being what they were, this is what happened, and the result was an album initially ignored and eventually hated for saying it was something it wasn’t.
But Squeeze might have found an audience, and surely been better remembered, via one slight change. Instead of billing it as by “the Velvet Underground,” call it what it is—Doug Yule’s solo album. Listened to on those terms, it’s a competent, at times charming ‘70s rock record. Further, it demonstrates how much Yule contributed to the tastefully bright sound of the Velvet Underground’s fourth album, Loaded, particular on “Caroline,” which channels Reed so successfully it sounds like he might be lurking on backing vocals.
26. Lou Reed, Metal Machine Music (1975)
In 1975, Lou Reed made the characteristically self-sabotaging decision to follow his highest-charting album ever with Metal Machine Music, four sides of nothing but feedback and noise. There was a method to Reed’s madness; it was created using carefully tuned and arranged guitars, effects, and studio editing, but to listeners it seemed like either a joke or Reed being pointedly difficult and openly hostile toward his audience.
Some who initially bought the record returned it to stores, thinking it was incorrectly manufactured. It was critically savaged; Rolling Stone said it sounded “like the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator” and it makes a lot of worst-albums-ever lists.
But the then-nascent punk movement picked up on it, and today it’s considered a forerunner of noise rock and industrial music. It’s still enormously difficult to listen to, but stands apart as a unique and prescient album from one of rock’s most groundbreaking, challenging artists.
25. The Doors, The Soft Parade (1969)
The Soft Parade is generally viewed as the Doors’ worst album; conventional wisdom holds that its use of brass and strings ruined the band’s sound, its tendency toward experimentation was a pretentious failure and lead singer Jim Morrison was too drunk to contribute much of value. Rolling Stone reviewed it as such: “Alternate suggested titles for The Soft Parade would be The Worst of the Doors, Kick Out the Doors, or best, The Soft Touch."
The Soft Parade is worse than infuriating, it’s sad.” To fans of ‘60s strangeness, this is sacrilege; it’s first eight tracks are a solid slab of pop psychedelia, all just a prelude to the title track—the best thing the band ever recorded.
Over eight-and-a-half minutes long, “The Soft Parade” takes the listener down a rabbit hole, first informing us “You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!” before embarking on a series of musical passages. Baroque classical into cheesy lounge pop into Brady Bunch-like incidental music before finally settling into a characteristic blues jam (declared to be “the best part of the trip”) that grows in intensity before finally declaring, “When all else fails we can whip the horse’s eyes and make them sleep and cry.” If any Doors song is time-capsule worthy, it’s this one.
24. The Who, It's Hard (1982)
The standard joke on The Who’s tenth album is that It’s Hard to listen to. Robert Christgau described it thusly: “Between the synths and the book-club poetry it’s the nearest thing to classic awful English art-rock since Genesis discovered funk.” Allmusic gave it two stars and described it as “an undistinguished final effort” that “featured few memorable melodies and little energy.”
After this, The Who went into semi-retirement, touring sporadically and not issuing another album for 24 years. But returning to It’s Hard today reveals it was the band’s strongest album since Quadrophenia; certainly far better than its previous album, the wretched Face Dances.
The hit anchoring this thing, “Eminence Front,” stands among the band’s best songs while appropriating an early ‘80s sound—no easy feat. The album found Pete Townshend incorporating synths but not as ham-fistedly as he had in the past. Meanwhile, on his second album with The Who, new drummer Kenney Jones stretches into his role enough to evoke Keith Moon but not imitate him.
Bassist John Entwistle, whose songs had been become the highlights of Who albums in recent years, contributes three characteristically tough tracks. Finally, the album’s closer, “Cry If You Want,” ends the album with brittle, driving guitars and wordy verses that give way to a percussive, sparse, simple chorus and an ethereal bridge—classic Who. Who knew they still had it in ‘em?
23. Tha Dogg Pound, Dogg Food (1995)
Kurupt kicked off the G-funk duo Tha Dogg Pound’s debut album Dogg Food with the line, “Now my rhymes are as potent as pipe bombs/It takes time to concoct rhymes like mines.” The latter claim was dubious but the former, it turns out, was dead-on accurate. Dogg Food’s lyrical content brought protest by Time Warner shareholders, which caused Interscope imprint Death Row Records to delay the album’s release by three months.
Listening to the album over two decades removed from those culturally charged times, this seems absurd. The controversy surrounding Tha Dogg Pound obviously only came about because its contemporaries Snoop Doggy Dogg, Dr. Dre, 2Pac, etc., had kicked up so much dust that guys in suits were primed to pounce on anything similar and did so here—way behind the eight ball.
Lyrically, Dogg Food is stuffed with lyrics that are vaguely menacing but barely register, characteristic of much of the best G-funk, where rappers shine by breezily flowing over a multi-layered beat, becoming just another element of it. Maybe it actually happened, but the thought of Time Warner investors trying to listen closely to what Kurupt and Daz Dillinger are actually saying on Dogg Food is laugh-out-loud funny.
Regardless, from front to back this is a consistent, solid example of the G-funk genre, close to touching past landmarks like The Chronic and Doggystyle, albeit with way less pop appeal.
22. Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (1970)
It’s not just Yoko Ono’s albums that are unfairly hated on; it’s the woman herself. For over four decades, Ono has been more or less blamed for the breakup of the Beatles (blame that can be much more squarely placed on Allen Klein). For many, this has translated to an all-consuming hatred of Ono and dismissal of, or refusal to even listen to, her music.
It is, admittedly, a hard sell; a Japanese performance artist either shrieks over loose rock jams or shakily sings slight pop songs. But to lovers of experimental music, her early albums are brilliant, even pioneering; recalling the more exploratory work of the German band Can. Even better, Ono’s ‘70s albums routinely featured contributions by her husband John Lennon, who found in her music the latitude to be much freer than he ever did on his generally dull work as a solo artist.
A prime example of all this is Ono’s first album, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, released simultaneously with a similarly packaged album by Lennon. Backed by Ringo Starr, the Beatles’ old pal Klaus Voormann and Ornette Coleman on one track, Ono’s debut is a spooky masterpiece.
Sure it never would have been released if she hadn’t married a Beatle, but you have to respect her resourcefulness and daring for using the opportunity to foist such an aural nightmare on an unsuspecting public.
21. Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak (2008)
Kanye West’s fourth album, 808s & Heartbreak, came as a bit of a shock to put it mildly. For one thing, it saw the rapper singing (heavily assisted by Auto-Tune) on almost every song. For another, it saw a sharp shift toward naked, emotional lyrics from an artist who spent most of his previous album boasting about how rich he was—and outselling 50 Cent as a result.
A lot of this was inspired by the recent death of his mother and collapse of his engagement, but it was still jarring. Reviews were mixed; most amusingly, Stephen Colbert said, “Why buy Kanye’s album? You can basically hear it for free. Just put a tin can to your ear and lean against a Pac-Man machine.” To put it in plain terms, 808s & Heartbreak had a lot of great ideas in it and sounded state-of-the-art, but it was a giant bummer.
However, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear why the album was necessary. It basically cleared the decks for Kanye artistically, giving him the latitude to make his next album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a grandiose masterpiece that made massive risks look par for the course simply because his previous album had been so severe. Future generations who look back at his discography will likely find this to be the most intriguing moment in it, and people who laughed it off at the time will seem short-sighted.
20. Guns N' Roses, Chinese Democracy (2008)
When an artist spends a solid decade recording an album, it’s destined to be hated on (Dr. Dre, take note). Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy arrived 15 years to the day after the band’s previous release and in that time had become the stuff of legend.
In July 1999, Spin magazine ran a cover story on the album, which at that point didn’t even have a title, compiling all the crazy rumors surrounding it: Producers come and gone, a revolving door of musicians of all stripes (when it was finally released, Chinese Democracy’s credits were a mile long), Shaquille O’Neal was making a cameo, Axl Rose working out, going techno, and going through past-life regression therapy, etc.
The singer’s public appearances—even doing regular things like going to the movies or going shopping—were treated like Big Foot sightings. Many updates on the status of Chinese Democracy came and went until it was suddenly shoved out as a Best Buy exclusive in November 2008. It sold okay, more so internationally, but surely didn’t make back its reported $13 million in production costs. Reviews were mixed and longtime fans of the band weren’t very enthusiastic. In the end, it just seemed like a big joke.
But the album had two big pluses going for it. First, Axl’s voice proved remarkably well preserved, he sounds like he was cryogenically frozen after the recording of “The Spaghetti Incident?” and thawed out a dozen years later to make this album. Second, you get what you pay for, and Axl spent millions on session musicians here. It shows, particularly on the guitar work (check out Buckethead’s bananas solo on “Better”).
Chinese Democracy’s biggest flaw isn’t its songs, which are actually quite good, or the way they’re performed. It's really the delay. It just should have come out closer to when the recording began. By the time it was released it was obsolete, a bombastic blast of big budget rock dropped into a market that no longer supported or even understood such a product. It wasn’t made for iTunes or YouTube, Axl expected fans to pay $17.99 for a physical copy of the album, then go home and vote for his video on Dial MTV.
19. De La Soul, Stakes Is High (1996)
If Stakes Is High came out today, it’d have a sticker on the cover trumpeting the J Dilla-produced title track and cameo appearance from Mos Def, but back in 1996, those guys were largely unknown. Instead, De Le Soul staked its fourth album on nothing but its own name and ambitions, having parted ways with its longtime producer Prince Paul. Released right on the cusp of hip-hop’s bling era, Stakes Is High made no concessions to mainstream commercial success, instead spending an hour basically lecturing its audience.
The stakes, De La seemed to be saying, were high not just for them, but for hip-hop in general—indeed for the entire world. On the album’s first single, “Stakes Is High,” Trugoy the Dove begins his verse by listing nine things he was sick of: “bitches shakin’ asses…talkin’ about blunts…Versace glasses...slang...half-ass award shows…name brand clothes…R&B bitches over bullshit tracks…cocaine and crack [and] swoll’ head rappers” (2Pac was offended, taking a little heard shot at De La on his track “Against All Odds”).
The skits between songs, previously one of the most fun elements of a De La album, are depressing slices of life like a redneck describing why he hates rap music and a homeless man (Robert Crumb’s brother, as it turns out) describing life on the street. Not surprisingly, this didn’t sell. But Stakes Is High has its fans, including, most notably, Prince Paul himself, who, in keeping with his self-deprecating disposition, says it’s his favorite De La album.
18. The Pharcyde, Labcabincalifornia (1995)
Again, if Labcabincalifornia came out today, boasting production by J Dilla on seven out of 17 tracks would be a big deal, but in 1995 no one cared, and The Pharcyde was even more SOL than De La in its efforts to grow up. Three years earlier, the four rappers in The Pharcyde had emerged out of nowhere with a perfectly realized debut—Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde—that was undeniably Californian yet completely out of step with the giant G-funk trend gripping its West Coast surroundings.
The Pharcyde sounded more like a transcontinental chapter of NYC’s Native Tongues collective, yet one that outdid its stylistic antecedents’ bizarre humor, irresistibly playful lyrics, and earthy jazz and funk-mining beats. Coming off such a perfect debut, it was difficult to accept something different. Writing in Rolling Stone over a decade later, Chris Rock summed it up best; “Only in rap do you get one-album-wonders...I don’t know what happened afterward, but the first Pharcyde album is incredible.”
America’s premier black stand-up comic refusing to acknowledge its existence speaks volumes about the reception that greeted The Pharcyde’s second album, Labcabincalifornia. It didn’t sell much, and The Los Angeles Times gave it two stars, describing it as slight: “The pleasures aren’t so immediate nor the ride so bizarre. And on first listen the casually delivered, low-key narratives nearly vanish into the background.”
That was the problem; sonically, the album sounded nothing like its predecessor, and the rappers, adopting new rhyme styles, cadences, and tones of voice didn’t sound the same anymore either. But this effectively new rap group was still a great one, particularly on highlights like “Runnin’,” which Mya appropriated and scored a hit with eight years later, and “Drop,” which was promoted with a Spike Jonze-directed video that had the group performing the song backwards.
17. Wu-Tang Clan, 8 Diagrams (2007)
No Wu-Tang Clan album after its first album has been universally beloved; like Illmatic, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is a classic built in entirely unique circumstances that can never be replicated. But the Wu’s fifth and most recent album, 8 Diagrams, arrived to particularly bizarre reception.
It didn’t sell much and critical reaction was mixed. Entertainment Weekly called it “a drab dilution of the Wu’s signature sample-heavy, raucous sound.” But 8 Diagrams’ harshest reviews came from the eight other members of the group (counting Cappadonna), who claimed its producer and ostensible leader RZA hijacked the album with a sound they didn’t like and felt fans wouldn’t identify with.
In an interview with Miss Info, Raekwon the Chef spoke at length on the situation, saying that they felt the album had too much live instrumentation (particularly too much guitar) and felt rushed. “This is not the vibe I want; it’s his vibe,” Rae said, adding that they tried to communicate this to RZA and he ignored them and pressed ahead. Wu-Tang standard-bearer Ghostface Killah made similar statements in the press.
Listening to the album now, it’s easy to see what Raekwon was talking about. The album features Wu signifiers like kung-fu movie samples and dense lyrics over dark beats, but strange elements stand out in the production, like the wandering bass line and lazy crash symbol in “Get Them Out The Way Pa.” “Unpredictable” sounds like the soundtrack to a suspenseful sequence in a "James Bond" movie with rappers stranded in the middle of the chaos, and then you have a batshit-crazy chorus from someone named “Dexter Wiggle.”
“The Heart Gently Weeps,” which rams together Erykah Badu, Red Hot Chili Peppers' guitarist John Frusciante, and Beatle George Harrison’s son Dhani for a pointless cover of his father’s song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” probably had Rae and Ghost seeing red, incredulous they were being forced to rap over this car crash.
Lyrically, RZA sounds worlds removed from the other members; while they spit the usual gritty crime narratives, he delivers lines like, “Lord of the Wu-Tang sword, know what that means? Like J.R. Tolkien, it’s the Lord of the Rings” (this didn’t help counter Rae’s characterization of him as “a hip-hop hippie”).
On “Sunlight,” he wanders off by himself for an entire track and appears to complain about the type of musical close-mindedness he was encountering from his fellow Wu members: “Yo, I’ve been highly misunderstood by those who met us. They had ears of corn and heads of lettuce.”
In the midst of all this chaos, most people missed something; 8 Diagrams is actually the Wu’s best album in a decade (even Rae had to reluctantly admit, “The album ain’t weak; it’s just not what y’all be expectin’”). Regardless of whether or not the overall sound of the music was universally agreed upon, it brings together every member of the Wu-Tang Clan—nine men with busy, often conflicting schedules—and they all sound fantastic.
And since this was the Wu’s first album since founding member Ol’ Dirty Bastard died three years earlier, it served as a funeral of sorts. On the final track, “Life Changes,” the group’s surviving members movingly pay tribute to ODB in verse, sharing very personal remembrances of what it felt like when they first got the tragic news of his death.
16. LL Cool J, Walking With A Panther (1989)
LL Cool J’s third album was greeted with some dismissal on its release in 1989, the complaints being that it was too commercial and focused on material wealth and romance (had these people heard LL’s previous albums?).
Rolling Stone dismissed the album as behind the times: “At least half of Panther is the de rigueur I’m-the-baddest stuff, in which L.L. disses other rappers and salutes his own phone line.” Yes, beefing with other rappers and using his music to sell something—two behaviors that need to completely disappear from hip-hop.
Another thing stacked against the album; going into it, LL had been abandoned by two-thirds of his production team, The L.A. Posse, over money squabbles. It didn’t matter; Rick Rubin was enlisted for a track and the Bomb Squad for another two. What emerged was a classic piece of late ‘80s hip-hop that yielded no less than five hit singles—“Going Back to Cali,” “I’m That Type of Guy,” “Jingling Baby,” “Big Ole Butt,” and “One Shot at Love.”
For hip-hop fans of any age or socioeconomic background, these songs served as the soundtrack for that summer and fall; they rocked jeeps and suburban school buses more or less equally.
By the way, the cat on the cover isn’t a panther and LL clearly isn’t walking with it, but Crouching Behind A Jaguar probably didn’t sound as cool.
15. EPMD, Business As Usual (1990)
Blame it on the title; EPMD’s third album was viewed as just another outing from the rap duo. The Los Angeles Times dismissed it as “hardly enough to get the FBI all worked up” (was that ever supposed to be the point of a rap record?) and Allmusic criticized its production, saying “Unfortunately, the sampling isn’t as clever as before,” strange considering the album draws its samples from a range of sources. Business As Usual is admittedly a bit impenetrable, perhaps a bit too raw for mass audiences.
There are no huge hits here, but it boasts clear highlights, including a well-tuned cameo from LL Cool J on “Rampage” and Redman’s debut on wax on two tracks. “Jane 3” is one of the edgiest chapters in EPMD’s seven-part (to date) "Jane" series; "Jane" shows up in drag as “Jay” and Parish exposes him as a girl and has sex with her.
And on “Gold Digger,” Eric and Parish thrillingly trade lines, warning, “Men in the ‘90s must watch themselves/Cause ladies of the '80’s got hip and went for self/With the new divorce laws, which entitles them half/That means the house goes, the car, you and half your cash”—beating Kanye to the topic by 15 years.
14. Eric B. & Rakim, Don't Sweat The Technique (1992)
Having established itself as one of the true heavyweights of hip-hop with its first three albums, Eric B. & Rakim, sagged a bit with its fourth and final effort, Don’t Sweat The Technique. Sales were about the same, but reviews were mixed. Entertainment Weekly complained the duo had “gone back to the well too many times, retaining the technique without maintaining the energy” and Spin grew tired of “Eric B.’s meat-and-potatoes approach to assembling tracks.”
Looking back, it seems clear what the problem was; the album is badly sequenced. It buries the lede, inexplicably beginning with “What’s On Your Mind,” a day in the life of Rakim in which he meets a girl, gets dissed, and disses her back (albeit relatively politely: “You don’t really look good; I hope you have a bad day”) and later meets up with her and they watch the Cosby Show.
Meanwhile, incendiary classics like the politically charged “Casualties of War,” in which Rakim chillingly raps from the perspective of a soldier going AWOL in the first Iraq War, and “Know The Ledge,” immortalized in the classic hood movie Juice, are thrown unceremoniously into the middle of the album.
13. Boogie Down Productions, Sex and Violence (1992)
Maybe it was the grotesque cover art. Maybe it was because it began with a minute of unhinged screaming. Whatever the reason, Boogie Down Productions’ fifth and final album, Sex and Violence, failed to catch fire. It sold half of what BDP’s previous album, Edutainment, had. KRS-One himself blamed it on backlash from an incident the previous year in which he rushed PM Dawn onstage, which seems a fairly unlikely reason for the album to fail but please keep in mind that KRS-One is completely insane.
Regardless, with the benefit of hindsight, Sex and Violence is perhaps BDP’s most fully realized album, surely its most fun. It avoids past pitfalls like getting bogged down in dull educational skits such as Edutainment’s "Exhibits A" through "Exhibit F," which saw KRS reading speeches by Abraham Lincoln.
Meanwhile, the rapper sounds positively elastic over beats that were state of the art in 1992, including three contributions from hip-hop’s resident genius, Prince Paul. A highlight is “Build & Destroy,” which sees KRS criticizing Afrocentrism and calling out Colin Powell as a fraud over a decade before Powell addressed the UN to declare Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
12. Black Flag, My War (1984)
Confrontational L.A. punk band Black Flag hit a brick wall with the release of its first album, Damaged, which was supposed to be released by the incongruously named Unicorn Records, a subsidiary of MCA. Once the company heard the album, MCA refused to distribute it, supposedly because its executives found it “anti-parent.” The real reason for the hold-up was more likely that Unicorn was mismanaged and deeply in debt, meaning Damaged would have lost money.
Regardless, Black Flag was forced into a strange compromise; it was allowed to release Damaged on its own SST Records, with the Unicorn logo on it and a sticker on the cover proclaiming it “anti-parent,” but thereafter lost the rights to its own name. The resulting legal limbo lasted three years, and once Black Flag regained the rights to its name it released a glut of albums—three in 1984 alone. The first of these was My War.
The A-side of the album continues where Damaged left off in terms of tempo, but stripped of Black Flag’s early tunefulness (yes, it had some) and the lyrics have gotten even more alienated (only Henry Rollins could make a song called “I Love You” sound so loathsome). But the B-side gets weird; it’s just three six-to-seven-minute songs—“Nothing Left Inside,” “Three Nights” and “Scream”—each slower and more terrifying than the last.
Punk audiences hated it. Not that Black Flag cared (in his book Get In The Van, Rollins describes the band’s mood at the time; “The My War album was out and we wanted to kill everyone”). Critics dismissed it; Robert Christgau wrote: “Henry Rollins’s adrenalin gives out. The consequent depression is so monumental that even Greg Ginn succumbs, adding only one classic to his catalogue of noise solos (“The Swinging Man”) and grinding out brain-damaged cousins of luded power chords behind the three dirges that waste side two.”
But the album gained a cult following and served as a key influence on the later development of indie metal and grunge; listening to the B-side of My War, the Melvins certainly come to mind. As long as there are young men in bad moods, there will be love for My War somewhere.
11. Eugene McDaniels, Headless Heroes Of The Apocalypse (1971)
In 1971, Eugene McDaniels, an R&B singer and songwriter with a penchant for propulsive, jazzy song structures and proselytizing lyrics, released Headless Heroes Of The Apocalypse. The album somehow found its way to then Vice President Spiro Agnew, who found its political messaging alarming enough to call Atlantic Records to complain (a sampling of the lyrics: “Jews and the Arabs, Semitic pawns in the master game/The player who controls the board sees them all as the same, basically cannon fodder”).
This is unfathomable today. It’d be like if Joe Biden called Univeral Music Group to complain about Frank Ocean. But Atlantic was spooked and didn’t push Headless Heroes Of The Apocalypse much further and it disappeared. (As for Agnew, two years later he was forced to resign after being accused of accepting $100,000 in bribes—perhaps he should have been attending to his own ethics rather than derailing politically-charged funk records.)
Two decades later, however, the album took on a second life as food for sample-hungry hip-hop producers, who carved it up like a Thanksgiving turkey. It was sampled by Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth, Eric B. & Rakim, Beastie Boys, Masta Ace, Gravediggaz, Organized Konfusion, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Jungle Brothers, to name just a few.
10. OutKast, Idlewild (2006)
OutKast’s sixth album had to do double duty as a proper release from the hip-hop duo and a soundtrack to its movie of the same name. The movie made back its budget but was more or less a flop (it’s at 48% on Rotten Tomatoes), which left the album without much of an event to peg itself to. It debuted at number two on the Billboard charts, failing to sell more than P. Diddy’s reality show-concocted girl group Danity Kane’s debut (Puff wisely demurred from bragging).
XXL commented in a blog entry, “I can only imagine how many people are going to be out of a job once this shit fails to go platinum.” Five singles from Idlewild were lofted and all failed to gain much attention.
But taken in total—Hollywood divorced of its accompanying movie and the expectations surrounding ‘Kast coming off of its massive crossover hit “Hey Ya!"—the album is actually brilliant, though challenging in spots. It groans under the weight of having to house Big Boi’s more conventional (yet spectacular) rap tracks, Andre 3000’s weird excursions, and songs written and recorded explicitly for the movie, but Idlewild pulls it off.
Plus it boasts a fiery appearance from a then-unknown Janelle Monae on “Call The Law” and a verse from Lil’ Wayne, then in the midst of his career-redefining mix tape hot streak between The Carter II and III.
The album rambles toward the end as it begins to sound more and more like the soundtrack for a musical set in Georgia in the 1930s, but always adds some redeeming touch of weirdness to its show tunes. It ends on “A Bad Note” with Andre paying homage to Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” with a nine-minute guitar solo.
The album’s only flaw is the division between Big Boi and Andre 3000. Their previous album had seen them move their respective material to entirely separate discs and that trend continues here; the two appear on few tracks together.
Six years later, there has been nothing further from OutKast and it has no plans to record a new album. Though, Big Boi’s solo albums are more or less OutKast albums without any Andre 3000, who has contented himself with turning in perfect cameos on other artists’ albums and doing Gillette commercials with Adrian Brody.
9. Neil Young, Trans (1982)
An album so strange he was sued for making it; Neil Young’s 1982 album Trans, to all outward appearances, was his response to musical trends of the era, but it was also quietly personal. The majority of the songs on Trans were recorded using synthesizers and a vocoder; it’s basically Young doing his own ragged version of Kraftwerk.
But the album’s heavily processed vocals also reflected Young’s difficulty communicating with his son, afflicted with cerebral palsy and unable to speak. These were solid influences and intentions, but coming from one of the earthiest rockers of the 1970s, it was hard to swallow; critics were baffled and the album sold poorly (it has still never been released on CD in the U.S.).
Young’s new label boss, David Geffen, sued the singer/songwriter for making deliberately uncommercial and unrepresentative music. It’s too bad the album was so firmly rejected, because with the benefit of hindsight, Young’s decision to fully commit to electronic music in the early 1980s was refreshingly forward-thinking.
More importantly, Trans boasts some great songs, like the haunting “Transformer Man,” which Young boldly included in his appearance on MTV Unplugged eleven years later, demonstrating how well the album’s material held up stripped of its divisive technology.
8. Radiohead, Hail To The Thief (2003)
Radiohead’s sixth album arrived at a strange time for the band. Coming off of its first three albums, which were consistently guitar-based, it tore itself apart to arrive at something new, the result being the experimental twin albums Kid A and Amnesiac.
Completely reinventing itself yet again probably seemed like a daunting task, so to avoid overanalyzing its material this go-round, the band flew to L.A. to record its new set of songs quickly. The end result was Hail To The Thief; a 14-track album that saw brisk sales and positive reviews, but this is where Radiohead lost a lot of people.
The Guardian called it “neither startlingly different and fresh nor packed with the sort of anthemic songs that once made them the world’s biggest band.” Even the band’s members now say they’re not happy with it; that it’s too long and some of the songs on it are half-baked.
It’s also slow; most of the album remains frustratingly at mid-tempo or slower. There are brilliant moments here but they get lost in too many sleepy ballads (“Sail To The Moon,” “I Will”) and plodding bores (“A Punch Up At A Wedding,” “We Suck Young Blood”—the latter being the worst thing the band has ever done).
Basically, HTTT is a downer, but there’s still a case to be made for it, particularly how it translates live. On its 2012 tour, Radiohead placed HTTT standouts such as “There There,” “The Gloaming,” and “Myxomatosis” alongside its current material and demonstrated that the album holds up well with what it’s done in the nine years since. In retrospect, it was a strong yet difficult transitional album rather than a failure.
7. Prince Paul, Psychoanalysis: What Is It? (1996)
Prince Paul’s solo debut, Psychoanalysis, was, according to Paul himself, “a record that nobody was supposed to hear.” Talking to Wax Poetics magazine in 2002, Paul recounted how in 1996, a decade into a brilliant career as a member of Stetsasonic and the Gravediggaz and producer for De La Soul and dozens of other artists, he’d grown so disillusioned with hip-hop that he decided to retire and open a Jiffy Lube or a Dunkin’ Donuts.
Toward that end, he made Psychoanalysis with the intention of killing his career. “This record was supposed to seal my fate,” Paul said. “Everything on it is—I won’t say horrible—but it’s not meant for people to like.”
That much is clear. The first track is just a beat and the repeated sample “As long as I can remember, people have hated me.” The second track is a spoken word/R&B number with a sung chorus that goes, “It’s a beautiful night for a homicide…a beautiful night for a kill.” Psychoanalysis proceeds to riff on sex, depression, guns, drinking, drug use and everything in-between, all over music skipping through any subgenre of hip-hop that crosses Paul’s mind.
“J.O.B. (Das What Dey Is!)” lifts the beat to “PSK What Does It Mean?” by Schoolly-D for an anonymous posse cut satirizing old school MCs flexing their wealth. “Dimepieces” channels Mantronix as the setting for an increasingly bizarre series of sex boasts.
“The World’s A Stage (A Dramady)” is a heavily laugh-tracked stand-up comedy routine with jokes like “So I saw your mother the other day, right? She had on a sweatshirt. It said UCLA on it. I was like ‘Goddamn! I didn’t know you went to college!’ She said, ‘I didn’t. My name is Ucla.’”
Not surprisingly, this didn’t sell and gained little notice from critics. Allmusic dismissed it: “He may have gotten a few laughs out of it, but listeners will be left out in the cold and find themselves asking if there is a point to all this.”
But it found an audience with other artists, notably Chris Rock, who contacted Paul and began working with him on his next album. Paul said, “The irony of it is that it resurrected my career instead of burying it.”
6. Nas, I Am.../Nastradamus (1999)
Conventional wisdom holds that Nas hit his artistic nadir with his third and fourth albums; I Am and Nastradamus. We could sit here all day quoting unfavorable reviews of both but let’s go with the one that cut the deepest; on Jay-Z’s “Takeover,” he assessed Nas’ entire discography to date, saying “two of them shits was doo”—meaning these albums.
The subsequent beef galvanized Nas and he shot back with “Ether” on his next album Stillmatic, which was hailed as a massive comeback and more or less cemented I Am and Nastradamus as garbage no one needed to bother with ever again.
Nas’ next album God’s Son featured the song “Last Real Nigga Alive,” on which he describes his entire career, bragging heartily about much of it. But he doesn’t dwell on this period, saying only, “In The Firm I learned I Am Nastradamus, QB’s Finest, ‘Oochie Wally’ faced more problems.”
The albums are not all that bad though. There are some terrible moments—the unsolicited sex advice of “Dr. Knockboot" comes to mind—but also many highlights, including three characteristically great collaborations with DJ Premier spread over the two albums; open letters to Notorious B.I.G. and 2Pac on “We Will Survive” (rap history nostalgia may be lame but no one does it better than Nas); and the detailed storyscape “Small World.”
Sure, the beats here are too glitzy, but that’s the way a lot of commercial rap sounded in the late ‘90s.
Really, the problem with I Am and Nastradamus was there was just too much of it. I Am came out in April 1999 and Nastradamus was out in time for Thanksgiving. Nas has never been one to glut the market with product; over two decades he’s released just 10 albums.
But as the ‘90s drew to a close he got greedy and it cost him a lot of credibility. If these two albums had been trimmed down to one carefully selected track list, the results might have been very different.
5. Led Zeppelin, In Through The Out Door (1979)
When Led Zeppelin went into the studio to record its eighth album in 1978, it was beset on all sides by depressing circumstances. Lead singer Robert Plant had lost his son to a virus the previous year; drummer John Bonham was struggling with heavy alcoholism, and guitarist Jimmy Page with heroin addiction. The band had exiled itself from England for tax reasons for two years, and the nascent punk movement threatened to render it irrelevant. Most importantly, and unbeknownst to the band, it was recording its last album.
Led Zeppelin was divided against itself during the studio sessions. Basically, Plant and bassist John Paul Jones were the only ones to show up on time, so they’d start writing and rehearsing songs, which were later augmented by Page and Bonham, working on entirely opposite schedules.
Not surprisingly, Plant and Jones dominate the material while Page and Bonham, the band’s heavy hitters, phone it in. According to Page, he and Bonham intended to immediately follow up the album with “a hard-driving rock album” but it was not to be. Bonham died the following year, effectively ending the band.
In Through The Out Door sold well but was poorly reviewed, and has a diminished stature in the band’s catalog (the album was initially released in a plain brown wrapper, compounding its shame). This is unfortunate, as it’s a solid set of songs with a distinctly dark mood that both serves as a continuation of Zeppelin’s work to date and reflects the band’s desperate circumstances in the last year of its existence.
Page may have been barely there but he was still the greatest guitarist of all time. His work ranges from perfect to perfectly weird throughout. Meanwhile, Jones’ tastefully applied Yamaha GX-1 keyboard gives the album an otherworldly sheen. Three songs from the session—“Wearing and Tearing”, “Ozone Baby” and “Darlene”—surfaced on the 1982 postscript Coda; expanding the picture of Zeppelin in its final throes.
4. M.I.A., Maya (2010)
M.I.A. emerged in 2005 with a debut album, Arular, so near to perfect it was hard to tell if it was all too carefully calculated or a complete fluke: a young woman from Sri Lanka by way of London explodes over irresistibly kinetic, relentless beats and proves herself an undeniable talent despite the fact that she can barely sing.
Her next album, 2007’s Kala, did anything but coast. It was challenging and all over the map, quoting the Modern Lovers and the Pixies, sampling the Clash and a Bollywood disco movie soundtrack and organizing a posse cut of rapping Australian aboriginal boys. And just when it seemed to have run out of gas commercially, its catchiest track, “Paper Planes,” landed in a trailer for the stoner comedy Pineapple Express and dealt the singer a massive hit.
Two years after Kala, M.I.A.’s world was very different. She’d married the heir to a liquor company fortune, lip-synced and danced onstage with very famous rappers while pregnant at the Grammys, given birth to a son, and gotten in a lame public fight with a reporter that involved accusations and counter-accusations about truffle-flavored French fries. In this environment, her third album, Maya, arrived with a thud. Reviews were lukewarm.
Pitchfork gave it a 4.4, complaining, “Everything that was great about M.I.A. has been stripped from this music.” Her frequent collaborator Diplo, who produced two songs on the album, gave an interview claiming M.I.A. didn’t care about the album (asked on Twitter why the sound of a toilet flushing is heard at the end of his “Tell Me Why,” he responded, “cuz [the] rest of [the] album is a turd”).
At the time of its release, it was difficult to forget all these clanging dismissals long enough to even listen to the album. Maya is abrasive, sure, but overall it’s catchy and compelling, as well as versatile in terms of tempo, mood, and volume. M.I.A. shows herself still very willing to experiment, and in the middle of the album delivers the one-two punch of the Suicide-sampling “Born Free” and the Sleigh Bells-assisted “Meds and Feds.”
One of Maya’s best songs was buried in its deluxe edition bonus tracks. The singer laments the effects of Internet addiction over an infectious beat from Baltimore-based producer Blaqstarr on “Internet Connection,” a sentiment all the trolls ripping into the album probably would have related to if they’d stopped complaining about it long enough to get to the end.
3. Nirvana, In Utero (1993)
Most of the hatred directed at Nirvana’s In Utero came before it was released. When the band entered the studio to record its third album in February 1993, expectations were beyond high. The band hadn’t just established itself as a massive band with its second album and major label debut, 1991’s Nevermind; it had upended the record industry itself, supposedly clearing away the excesses of hard rock hair bands and ushering in a new era of “alternative” music.
Fully aware of the absurdity of the situation it found itself in, Nirvana set out to record an uncompromising and perhaps even alienating set of songs (Kurt Cobain began the album by announcing, “Teenage angst has paid off well; now I’m bored and old”). The band paid for the sessions with producer Steve Albini itself and refused to allow its management and record company to affect the process in any way.
When these stakeholders finally did get to hear the album, they were not happy, calling the songwriting poor and the overall sound unlistenable. The band returned to Albini to ask that the album be remixed; he refused, and commented on the situation in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. This escalated when Newsweek covered the story in an article Nirvana refuted in a letter to the editor, which was reprinted as a full-page ad in Billboard, asserting that it wasn’t being forced to change the album despite what was being reported in the press.
Behind closed doors, however, Nirvana was changing the album. Either because of external pressure or its own doubts, it had producer Scott Litt remix two songs, “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies,” which later became the album’s biggest hits. When it was released, of course, all of this debate became trivial. In Utero debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, took over MTV and modern rock radio, and received near universal critical acclaim.
Not that it mattered. Over the next seven months, Cobain descended deeper into drug addiction and depression before killing himself with a shotgun blast to the head.
2. The Rolling Stones, Exile On Main Street (1972)
In spring 2010, Rolling Stone magazine ran a cover story on the making of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 album Exile On Main St., timed to run in connection with a recently released box set giving it the deluxe treatment and celebrating its legacy. But when it was originally released, Rolling Stone sang a very different tune about Exile, with reviewer Lenny Kaye dismissing it: “You can leave the album and still feel vaguely unsatisfied.”
The majority of reviewers reported being similarly unimpressed. In the 2003 book According To The Rolling Stones, Keith Richards acknowledged Exile was “pretty much universally panned.” Scanning the album’s track list, it’s easy to see why; save for the live staple “Tumbling Dice” there are no hits here. But that’s one of its strengths; this is a long, prime-era Stones album devoid of songs rendered too familiar by repeated airings on classic rock radio and greatest hits compilations.
Four decades later, it’s the story of Exile’s making that has become rote. Forced out of England by draconian tax laws, the band repaired to the south of France and ended up recording an album in the basement of Nellcote, a beautiful, gigantic mansion that used to belong to a Nazi. Gram Parsons was there and they did heroin and rode around in speedboats and blah blah blah blah blah.
The point is that the album that eventually emerged, once Mick Jagger was able to wrest it out of Richards’ hands and fix everything about it in an L.A. studio, was a moody, complex, and wonderfully evocative beast, with each one of four sides arranged as a perfect suite all its own. But well after it’d been hailed a thousand times over as the Stones’ masterpiece, Jagger himself remained unimpressed. In 2003 he said, “Exile is not one of my favourite albums...it’s really not good.” Of course, Jagger is canny enough to ensure every new Stones album is marketed as its best since Exile to capitalize on the album’s cache.
1. Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique (1989)
It must seem crazy now, as Paul’s Boutique sits comfortably near the top of so many best-albums-of-all-time lists, but when the Beastie Boys’ second album was originally released in 1989, the initial reaction it saw was confusion and indifference. The audience the Beastie Boys had built for themselves, and hip-hop music in general, with their brash, broad debut Licensed To Ill didn’t know what to make of this second album with its dense instrumentation and rapidly paced lyrics filled with obscure references and strange jokes.
Critics reluctantly admitted it was good and other musicians picked up on it (Miles Davis was a fan), but in commercial terms the album was a flop, selling a fraction of what its predecessor had. Speaking to Spin magazine 16 years after Paul’s Boutique’s release, the late MCA blamed lack of support from the record company, reporting that Capitol had suddenly gone through massive restructuring and the label’s new president told them, “Look, I don’t have time for this. The new Donny Osmond album is coming out.”
Paul’s Boutique was both ahead of its time and very much of its time. Its layers upon layers of samples may have been too complex for a commercial audience in the late ‘80s, but it was also an achievement that could never happen today, as hip-hop artists now get sued left and right for copyright infringement over use of samples, no matter how obscure they are. But rap’s first decade was like the Wild West in this respect; Paul’s Boutique even dared the Beatles to sue. The Beasties got away with it.