DavesMusicDatabase.com is devoted to ranking, rating, and reviewing music of all genres and eras. The DMDB blog serves up album and song reviews, best-of lists, music history snapshots, and music-related essays.
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| First posted 12/31/2014; updated 1/8/2021. |
 | Dave’s Music Database:Top Albums of 2014 |
Based on a combination of year-end lists (see resources at bottom of page) and overall status in Dave’s Music Database, these are the top 25 albums of 2014. Be sure to also check out the DMDB post of the top 50 songs of 2014.
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Black Messiah |
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Released: December 15, 2014 Peak: 5 US, 14 RB, 47 UK, 17 CN, 50 AU Sales (in millions): -- Genre: R&B |
Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to singles charts.
Total Running Time: 55:54 |
Rating:  4.430 out of 5.00 (average of 28 ratings)
Awards: (Click on award to learn more).
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About the Album: With 1995’s Brown Sugar and 2000’s Voodoo, D’Angelo made “two classics that twisted gospel, soul, funk, and hip-hop with aloof but deep-feeling swagger.” AMG Then he disappeared for fourteen years. That built up “impossible levels of anticipation for…Black Messiah, [but] was worth the wait.” RS’20 “D’Angelo retains the rhythmic core that helped him create Voodoo, namely Questlove, bassist Pino Palladino, and trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and adds many players to the mix, including guitarist Jesse Johnson and drummers James Gadson and Chris Dave. Q-Tip contributed to the writing of two songs, but a greater impact is made by Kendra Foster, who co-wrote the same pair, as well as six additional numbers, and can often be heard in the background.” AMG The album “invites comparisons to the purposefully sloppy funk of Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On.” AMG D’Angelo brings “a new political rage to deep-soul grooves” RS’20 to “the dreamy churn” AMG of “The Charade, responding to the Black Lives Matter movement: ‘All we wanted was a chance to talk / Instead we only got outlined in chalk.’” RS’20 There are also “societal ruminations within the fiery judder of 1000 Deaths” AMG and “the falsetto blues of Till It’s Done, fueled as much by current planetary ills and race relations as the same ones that prompted the works of D’Angelo’s heroes, strike the deepest.” AMG “Among the material that concerns spirituality, devotion, lost love, and lust, D’Angelo and company swing, float, and jab to nonstop grimace-inducing effect. On the surface, Sugah Daddy seems like an unassuming exercise in fusing black music innovations that span decades, and then, through close listening, the content of D’Angelo’s impish gibberish becomes clear. At the other end, there’s Another Life, a wailing, tugging ballad for the ages that sounds like a lost Chicago-Philly hybrid, sitar and all, with a mix that emphasizes the drums.” AMG “Black Messiah clashes with mainstream R&B trends as much as Voodoo did in 2000. Unsurprisingly, the artist’s label picked this album’s tamest, most traditional segment – the acoustic ballad Really Love – as the first song serviced to commercial radio. It’s the one closest to ‘Untitled (How Does It Feel),’ the Voodoo cut that, due to its revealing video, made D’Angelo feel as if his image was getting across more than his music.” AMG “In the following song, the strutting Back to the Future (Part I), D’Angelo gets wistful about a lost love and directly references that chapter: ‘So if you’re wondering about the shape I’m in / I hope it ain’t my abdomen that you’re referring to.’ The mere existence of his third album evinces that, creatively, he’s doing all right.” AMG |
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First posted 4/25/2022. |
Voodoo |
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Released: January 25, 2000 Charted: February 12, 2000 Peak: 12 US, 14 RB, 21 UK, 7 CN Sales (in millions): 1.7 US, 0.1 UK, 1.8 world (includes US and UK) Genre: R&B |
Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to singles charts.
Total Running Time: 78:54 |
Rating:  4.119 out of 5.00 (average of 16 ratings)
Quotable: “The ultimate achievement of the neo-soul era” – Rolling Stone Awards: (Click on award to learn more).
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About the Album: D’Angelo emerged on the scene in 1995 with Brown Sugar, and album that “helped launch contemporary R&B.” AMG However, he became “disillusioned with the genre that had just anointed him a rising star. ‘I don’t consider myself an R&B artist,’ the then-26-year-old told Jet. ‘R&B is pop, that’s the new word for R&B.’ In his quest to create something new, he looked to both the masters of soul (Marvin, Curtis, Stevie) and contemporary innovators (Lauryn, Erykah). The end result was Voodoo, a moving, inventive masterpiece that stands as the ultimate achievement of the neo-soul era.” RS500 “His soulful voice is just as sweet as it was on Brown Sugar, though D’Angelo stretches out with a varied cast of collaborators.” AMG One of those is producer and drummer Questlove, who called the album a “vicarious fantasy.” RS500 The album also included “trumpeter Roy Hargrove and guitarist Charlie Hunter, fellow neo-soul stars Lauryn Hill and Raphael Saadiq, and hip-hop heads like DJ Premier, Method Man & Redman, and Q-Tip.” AMG “It must have been difficult to match his debut (and the frequent delays prove it was on his mind), but Voodoo is just as rewarding a soul album as D’Angelo’s first.” AMG “Voodoo places Pink Floyd-style cosmic jams (Playa Playa) next to Prince-inspired erotica (Untitled [How Does It Feel]).” RS500 At the time D’Angelo said, “I’m just looking at Voodoo as just the beginning…It took a while, but I’m on my way now.” RS500 He wouldn’t release another album for fourteen years. |
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First posted 3/30/2008; last updated 4/20/2022. |
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill |
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Released: August 25, 1998 Peak: 14 US, 16 RB, 2 UK, 12 CN, 2 AU Sales (in millions): 8.0 US, 1.0 UK, 15.6 world (includes US and UK), 18.70 EAS Genre: R&B/hip-hop |
Tracks:Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to charts.
Total Running Time: 69:20 |
Rating:4.266 out of 5.00 (average of 27 ratings)
Quotable:“One of the best solo female albums ever recorded.” - Consequence of SoundAwards:(Click on award to learn more).
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About the AlbumLauryn Hill had distinguished herself as “most distinctive voice” AZ and “social heart” AM of the rap group the Fugees on their albums Blunted on Reality (1994) and The Score (1996). The latter made the Fugees one of the bestselling hip-hop groups in history. She “proved her mettle as a vocalist to contend with” JM-10 on the trio’s cover of “Killing Me Softly.”Still, “few were prepared for her stunning debut.” AM It sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, was a number one album in the U.S., and landed her eight Grammys, including Album of the Year and Best New Artist. She took “seventies soul and made it boom and signify to the hip-hop generation.” 500 It was “a state of the union for the young, black, and female at the end of the millennium, split between boldly assured raps and achingly vulnerable R&B confessions.” EW’12 Musical InfluencesMiseducation “is infused with African-American musical history.” EW’07 It “weaves a tapestry of sound” JM-14 that integrates neo-soul, R&B, hip hop, reggae, and a singer/songwriter vibe. Not only does Hill serve up an “Aretha Franklin–caliber vocal,” TM but she “has the funky grunt of vintage Stevie Wonder” EW’07 as well as the “uptown soul of Roberta Flack.” EW’07 She also “recalls the moral fervency of Bob Marley;” EW’07 the album cover even references Marley’s Burnin’. JM-48 However, “Miseducation is no withdrawal from the nostalgia bank.” EW’07She also keeps things current, collaborating with R&B superstars like D’Angelo and Mary J. Blige, and “flowing from singing to rapping, evoking the past while forging her future.” EW’07 Her “verses were intelligent and hardcore, with the talent to rank up there with Method Man” AM and “she could move from tough to smooth in a flash, with a vocal prowess that allowed her to be her own chanteuse (à la Mariah Carey).” AM “If her performing talents, vocal range, and songwriting smarts weren’t enough, Hill also produced much of the record, ranging from stun-gun hip-hop to smoother R&B with little trouble.” AM Hill’s BackgroundHill wasn’t a cliché, rapping about the trauma of ghetto life – and she wasn’t trying to pretend that was her background. She was “one of the few middle-class rappers who was actually honest about it.” JM-19 She “never held back from injecting the record with her own autobiographical history, touching on her pregnancy, her fallout with her Fugees bandmates and the intersection of love and God.” PM She was an Ivy leaguer, “Columbia University English major blessed with a broad literary arsenal that simultaneously reflected her dexterity as a wordsmith and her acute understanding of the latent but deadly power in the economy of words.” JM-12She “broke through to gain ‘mainstream acceptance’ in a way that never discounted or altered her blackness.” JM-46 “She was a conscious singer who wore dreadlocks” JM-41 and wouldn’t play into a misogynistic bitches-and-hoes stereotype. “She was the absence of the hoochie…the absence of the rap ho.” JM-117 “She was sexy, but she wasn’t selling sex.” JM-41 “She had the ability to elicit strong sorta familiar urges in men in addition to sexual ones.” JM-37 An Unintended BlockbusterWhile she wasn’t shooting for a blockbuster, “she clearly realizes the benefit of wrapping even the harshest rhetoric in mesmerizing grooves.” EW’07 With sales of 422,000 copies in its first week, Miseducation broke the record for most first-week sales by a female artist. PM Paste magazine’s Matt Mitchell called it “the greatest debut album of the last three decades.” PMThe fame had a devastating effect, though. She “was a twenty-three-year-old girl who bared her soul and made a stellar, grown-ass-woman album.” JM-112 However, she struggled. “Lauryn Hill was messy, but she was exactly the kind of messy you’re supposed to be in your twenties.” JM-119 She had to deal with the stress of being in the spotlight, trying to balance motherhood and career, and dealing with being put on a pedestal as a model for black women. More than twenty years later, she has yet to record a follow-up studio album. The Album’s ImpactIt is “one of the best solo female albums ever recorded” CQ and “arguably the greatest album of a generation.” JM-xvi In 2017, NPR ranked it the second greatest album made by a woman, only by Joni Mitchell’s Blue. JM-4 In Joan Morgan’s book She Begat This, the album is compared to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. “The same thing that made Thriller amazing was the same thing that made Miseducation amazing. It turned a corner and shifted the culture…Lauryn made herself so vulnerable that it was super-empowering and that uplifted women.” JM-121“Women of the hip-hop generation were the frontliners of what we now know to be Wakandan warriorship.” JM-x Time magazine put her on the cover in 1999. Out of 525 issues in the ‘90s, only seventeen black figures made the cover – and only five worked in arts and entertainment. JM-31 In the final chapter of She Begat This, a slew of artists are noted as being influenced by Lauryn Hill. Among them are D’Angelo, Beyoncé and Solange Knowles, Kendrick Lamar, and Kanye West. Hill “speaks eloquently on how the creators of urban music could use a moral compass,” TM putting the industry – including her own former bandmates and record execs – for putting “more emphasis on the bottom line than making great music.” AM This is “a collection of overtly personal and political statements.” AM “Yet the beauty of the album lies in Hill’s ability to make her self-righteousness ravishing.” EW’07 She made “an album of often astonishing strength and feeling” EW’07 which is “a perfect blend of hip-hop, R&B, gospel, and soul.” CQ The Songs“The slate of songs on this record…are immaculately constructed and distinctively perfect.” PM “The single Ex-Factor very well might just be the greatest soul song (and breakup song) written in the last 30 years…Who else could make ‘reciprocity’ sound so damn devastating?” PM“The swinging sermon” 500 Doo Wop (That Thing) was a chart-topper which also was “an intelligent dissection of the sex game that saw it from both angles.” AM That song’s line, “How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?’ also “turns out to be the defining question of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” TM A chart-topping hit by a female rapper proved quite the rarity. The pop charts didn’t see it happen again for two decades, when Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” marked the first time since 1998 that a solo female rap single reached #1. JM-123 In skits between songs, Ras Baraka, a poet and mayor of Newark, plays the role of a teacher. In the first skit, he reads Lauryn’s name during roll call and she is absent. In subsequent skits, he discusses “love” and what it means with the class. It sends a message about the theme of Miseducation that she “opted out of that protective environment and chose instead to learn those difficult lessons while being out in the world.” JM-120 Throughout the album, the listener “can hear and feel the messages she tries to get across about God, love, motherhood, and life.” CQ To Zion, which features Carlos Santana, is about putting her family before her career. It was “a universally powerful moment of possibility, relatable for all women faced with pregnancy under unconventional circumstances. For black women…it was a deeply need affirmation.” JM-89 However, when she presented that song to Tommy Mottola, who was then the head of Sony Music and Entertainment, he “pronounced it dead on arrival. Mottola was anxious to replicate the Fugees’ success and thought this new mélange of soul, reggae, and relatively little hip hop from one of rap’s best emcees was too much of a departure from a proven formula.” JM-69 Jackson and her manager responded by taking Lost Ones to Ruffhouse Records cofounder Chris Schwartz. “In a genre where the battle record is a revered staple, this one brought the fire.” JM-70 It was “beautiful and bellicose, …showcased the best of Lauryn’s skills as an emcee, [and] was so purely hip hop that it appealed directly to her original fan base.” JM-70 “What was also unique about ‘Lost Ones’ was the quality of Hill’s rage. Its source of inspiration might have been a broken heart, but it was…completely sans or pleading…Hill’s delivery was calm, measured, and focused on her target.” JM-72
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First posted 3/28/2008; last updated 10/2/2024. |
