Year’s Best: Okayplayer’s Top 14 Albums Of 2014

It’s that time of the year, folks. When we play like Pete Rock’s elders and reminisce over our favorite musical moments from the last 365-day cycle, re-availing ourselves of all it had to offer. OKP is here to help jog that memory with it’s Top 14 Albums of the calendar year 2014, the absolutely objective, 100% factual guide to the best of the year’s best. The 14th year of the 21st century commenced with an explosion of new-school G-funk; Madlib and Freddie Gibbs can both vouch. But cocaine piñatas and oxymorons are far from all the year had to offer. We were welcomed to the Art Official Age by Prince, taught a proper lesson in how to Run The Jewels once more with Killer Mike and EL-P, introduced to the formidable creative collision that is NehruvianDOOM. Add to that some new flame from the ever-enigmatic future-frequency freaker SBTRKT , Flying Lotus‘ dread-filled opus, Ghostface Killah assuming the role of a verbal vigilante and you’ve got a pretty damn good year in music. But it was the twilight of the year that really defined it with a break-the-internet moment from one of the music world’s most unusual suspects. It was D’Angelo that revealed himself to be pop music’s Black Messiah, and we’re all still very much recovering from that discovery. We could go on and on about what it all means about our place in the universe, in American history, in our headlong rush into the coming singularity where we all become cybernetic organisms. But this list is about the music, not the memories or the metaphysics. So without further ado, here are OKP’s Top 14 Albums of the year,in no particular order–except that Black Messiah is #1. Read on…