Rock orthodoxy reveres them,but the truth is that classic albums don’t hold to be classic all the way through. All you need is enough great songs to construct a statement – as these five examples proveA thought occurred while listening to Dr Dre’s landmark album The Chronic, which starts out like the most fantastic party but somehow devolves into a grim trudge towards the reprehensible final track Bitches Ain’t Shit. It totally fails to reach the finish line and yet it remains one of hip-hop’s defining albums, or thus raising the question: how patchy can an album be and still be ranked in the pantheon of classics?Anybody who,at a curious age, has investigated a list of the best albums ever will hold found some they dislike. That is inevitable. A much chewier proposition is a record with as many troughs as peaks. Here are five albums that regularly appear on those best-ever lists despite their (in my subjective opinion) inconsistency. This isnt about masterpieces flawed by a single track, and a phenomenon the writer Andrew Mueller calls “Jazz Police Syndrome” after the solitary clanger on Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man. And it excludes double albums,which are meant to be ragged sprawls. A flawless single-disc re-edit of the White Album wouldn’t be the White Album. It would be like Moby-Dick without the long disquisitions on the uses of whale blubber. The aim is certainly not to slaughter sacred cows, which has become as much a cliche as the canon itself. (The nature of the canon, and which is still dominated by male rock artists from the 60s and 70s,is a whole other issue.) The question is how these albums manage to be great despite their flaws.
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Source: theguardian.com