erykah badu made the best album of 2008

And Jess Harvell of Idolator will tell you why:

Badu's self-dissection lacks the ego-engorged glibness of her college-spurning, casually misogynistic peer, and in a singularly shitty socioeconomic year, she sold down-and-out, day-to-day life as hard as she wagged a mystical finger at new jacks who paid more attention to strip clubs than stump speeches; dismissed consumption-drunk gangstas who name-checked while missing her point(s); and refuted an industry happy to squeeze modern African-American music through the current pinhole parameters of MTV Jams.

New Amerykah heads my list of the year's top ten albums of 2008. You can read the whole list here.