What’s an Important Album? It’s an album that is perceived to be a momentous work of ambition, invention, and high artistic credibility before it is released, and then proves to actually be so, planting itself in a highly visible place in the culture and acting as a signifier for the year in retrospect. It’s the one album you can’t avoid hearing about at the end of the year to an almost annoying degree; “Important” in this context can be taken to mean “legitimately great” or “incredibly gas-baggy.” But either way, an Important Album stands apart from the pack as a year-defining work.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Merriweather Post Pavilion were Important Albums. I liked a lot of albums this year—I made a Top 50 list with a dozen or so favorites to spare—but I can’t think of one that was an Important Album.
