Holiday Gift-Giving--The Hints of ’92

How does Madonna’s musical product compare with her literary and film endeavors?. . .Which of those Seattle bands offers the best grunge for the buck? . . . Is Garth’s latest album as good as his show?. . .Which rappers are for kids and which are for adults only?. . .Are there some worthy soundtrack albums out there?

Those are the kinds of questions facing holiday shoppers. Calendar’s annual Top 40 Shopping Guide is designed to ease the burden by summarizing The Times’ reviews of 40 of the nation’s most popular and/or critically admired albums, listed alphabetically. The ratings are based on a scale of one star (poor) to four stars (excellent). The comments are from the original reviews, but the ratings sometimes reflect additional staff input.

* * * “Aladdin” original soundtrack, various artists, Walt Disney. Alan Menken is alternately scoring a musical-comedy and an action movie, and he acquits himself heroically on both counts. “Friend Like Me” and “Prince Ali” are showstoppers in the tradition of “Beauty and the Beast’s” “Gaston.”

* * “The Bodyguard” original soundtrack, Arista. Whitney Houston’s half of the album marks a return to pop after her last album’s pronounced R&B.; The mix of various popsters on the other half is unremarkable.

* * 1/2 Bobby Brown, “Bobby,” MCA. It goes down smooth enough, but there’s hardly a track here that we won’t be hard-pressed to recall a decade from now. For all his sex-you-up braggadocio, Brown comes off as a supremely confident cipher whose woo-woo conviction is all momentary.

* * * 1/2 Peter Gabriel, “Us,” Geffen. Though most of his musical tricks no longer come as a surprise in these tales about couples and his own failed relationships, you have to marvel at how seamlessly he integrates the world-beat players into his ethereal post-art-rock sound.

* * Madonna, “Erotica,” Maverick/Warner Bros. The crown dominatrix of pop has taken the bratty persona flayed across the screen in “Truth or Dare” and put it on record, spending less time begging to be loved and more just dishing, dissing and making dirty jokes, dancing all the distasteful while.

* * * Pearl Jam, “Ten,” Epic. Songs like “Alive” and the chilling “Jeremy” fit the Teen Angst genre, but there’s plenty that’s poetic and nothing pandering about this Seattle crew’s fairly progressive hard rock. It’s too early to tell, but Pearl Jam could be a Led Zeppelin for the ‘90s.

* * Prince & the N.P.G., “ ,” Paisley Park/Warner Bros. A random mishmash of silly ideas set to irresistible beats, roughly corresponding to Prince’s usual ratio of 90% flesh, 10% spirit. Prince has always been indulgent, but this is a pedestrian indulgence.