5 CDs Worth Your Time

By Josh Tyrangiel

Grammy Awards were handed out last week in 107 categories. If you didn't win one, you probably weren't trying. (Or you were up against Ray Charles' much-loved, little-listened-to Genius Loves Company.) Here, TIME's Josh Tyrangiel picks through the albums the 17,000-member recording academy rewarded and a few it mysteriously overlooked to find ones you will like.

KANYE WEST

THE COLLEGE DROPOUT

IT HAS BEEN SAID that West's rhymes against higher education make him a dangerous role model, in which case--good. Dangerous role models are the only ones, musically speaking, worth a damn. As the survivor of a life-threatening car wreck (he recorded his vocals for the song Through the Wire with his jaw wired shut), West isn't really anticollege so much as drunk on live-life-now narcissism. He uses most of Dropout, winner of the Best Rap Album prize, to congratulate himself for doing the work it took to become a star and berating the chumps who buy into a system that he believes slowly deprives them of their dreams. There are moments when West is as funny (and as petulant) as Eminem, but as his choir sings, "When it comes to being true, at least true to me/ One thing I've found, one thing I've found, oh no you never let me down," you will agree: he knows a few things they don't teach at Harvard.

TIFT MERRITT

TAMBOURINE

SHE ROCKS A little more than most crooners and croons a little more than most rockers, so Merritt never stood much of a chance in the straightforward Best Country Album category. Like all genre crossers, she uses whatever works--an R&B horn section, the crisp guitar of Heartbreaker Mike Campbell--to create an effortlessly seductive record that swings from the cool influence of Dusty Springfield to the complicated warmth of Nanci Griffith.

STEVE EARLE

THE REVOLUTION STARTS ... NOW

NEVER MIND THAT the revolution Earle proclaimed didn't happen on Nov. 2. For lefties, this winner in the Best Contemporary Folk category still offers righteous anger at the direction the country is taking and the malevolence of the Establishment--just as a good folk album should. And any right-winger who can't laugh at the skulking, faux reggae Condi, Condi (surely one of the best love songs ever written about a former National Security Adviser) deserves to be locked in a room with Lee Greenwood for eternity.

MODEST MOUSE

GOOD NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE BAD NEWS

AS YOU MAY HAVE GUESSED from the title, Modest Mouse is fueled by pessimism, so losing in the Best Alternative Album category probably didn't come as a surprise. The key to the band's appeal, though, is an unexpected lack of bitterness. Bad things happen--oh, well, the band says on Float On, its first radio hit in a decade-long career. Isaac Brock's squawked-out vocals and an appearance by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band turn the downward spiral into something arch, melodic and ever so fun.

YOUSSOU N'DOUR

EGYPT

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I'm incapable of separating my dislike of world music from my dislike of the dinner parties at which it's played. But Egypt, winner in the Best Contemporary World Music category, is not the usual easy-listening exotica shrink-wrapped for the appetizer course. The melodies traipse from Cairo to Dakar; the lyrics are in Wolof; the liner notes offer translation and explain that the songs are about Sufi scholars, most of whom seem to practice a West African strain of Islamic Calvinism. Lest you fear learning something, N'Dour's voice sweeps and swells with a passion that makes listening to him even in complete ignorance a form of enlightenment.