The Duran Duran Tribute Album

Tribute albums usually added up to drastically less than the sum of their parts (under-appreciated artist's material + rising stars and old hands covers = uninspired filler with the odd flash of brilliance.). This 1997 tribute to Duran Duran turns out a hell of a lot better than it could have, what with the thin, if pleasurable, songcraft of these preening pop stars being mixed in with a lot of late nineties pop-punk, ska-punk and what passed for alternative (The Deftones? What The Fuck!). And yet another hideous cover painting - sorry about that folks.

A tribute album worthy of its aluminum ('twas an invention of the CD era) should make you look at the artist another way (as the Kiss tribute with Garth Brooks undoubtedly did for people other than me). And this rag-tag collection does show that Duran Duran's songs can be fucked with for entertainment purposes. Witness Goldfinger merging the early eighties together by turning "Rio" into a shrieking tribute to Ronnie James Dio or the ultra-obscure Wise Cracks, successfully skank-up "Come Undone" or the Mr. T. Experience unearthing a sinewy pop song called "Is There Something I Should Know" from the wild boys' back catalog or Wesley Willis doing whatever the hell he did to "Girls on Film". Consider the highlights of this album perfect fodder for a future playlist.



1 Rio - Goldfinger
2 Hold Back the Rain - Buck-O-Nine
3 Planet Earth - Home Grown
4 The Chauffeur - Deftones
5 Come Undone - Wise Crack
6 Hungry Like the Wolf - Reel Big Fish
7 The Reflex - Less Than Jake
8 Ordinary World - Riverfenix
9 A View to a Kill - Gob
10 Girls on Film - Bjorn Again
11 The Seventh Stranger - The Wrens
12 Save a Prayer - Eve's Plum
13 New Religion - Jimmy Eat World
14 Is There Something I Should Know? - Mr. T Experience
15 Girls on Film - Wesley Willis

"We just wanted to be pop stars really - the music wasn't that important."*

The Duran Duran Tribute Album CD

* the quote (much paraphrased in my mind by now) is from an old interview I saw with the band and those words have stuck more closely to me than any of their songs.