I don't get it...Exile on main Street-Blue

I’d love to hear a Taylor Swift covering Joni Mitchell album!

Those two bimbos rock! You know, as much as they can for being women...

I think when seemingly every media outlet lavishes something with effusive praise, I go into it with a certain expectation that causes me to be disappointed sometimes.
In that situation, I feel like my ability to take the thing on it’s own terms is compromised.
I also think time/place and how I’m exposed to something effects how I feel about it. If something is associated with a very negative experience, it’s hard for me to appreciate it.
With these particular LPs, they were released a decade before I was born, so it wasn’t like, “oh, Joni Mitchell and the Rolling Stones have new LPs out.” I just sought them out from the perspective of “these LPs came out 30 years ago,” or whatever. They were obviously not contemporary releases.
In that scenario, I just thought they were both absolutely brilliant.
With Exile on Main Street, not only do the songs seem to attain a unique, hard-to-define kind of soulful, scuzzy majesty (‘Tumbling Dice,’ ‘Torn and Frayed,’ ‘Let it Loose,’ ‘Soul Survivor,’) but there’s real diversity between something like “Rip This Joint” and “Torn and Frayed,” between “I Just Want to See His Face” and “Sweet Virginia,” between “Ventilator Blues” and “Let it Loose,” etc. etc.

Blue is just genius to me.
The combination of highly sophisticated harmonic composition with such intense emotion and poetry is just masterful to me.

Well, as a huge fan of the run spanning Beggar's Banquet through Sticky Fingers, my reaction to Exiles was the same as yours.  I WANTED to like it, I believed it when people so much smarter  than me told me I was SUPPOSED to like it, but I just couldn't break into it.  Over the years, I've owned 3 or 4 copies, all of which I played in depth, and then finally gave up and sold.  There's obviously something there, but other than maybe 2 or 3 tracks, nothing to compare with the accomplishments of the preceding albums.

As Kavi says, to each his own.

I think critiques don't want to be mainstream. Why is Sgt. Pepper rated ahead of Abbey Road? I never understood it.