Red Hot + Blue: A Tribute to Cole Porter

In a way it’s fitting that one of the longest-running pop-music tribute series inaugurated itself with an album filled with reinterpretations of one of the definitive American songwriters and composers of the early 20th Century: if you start with Cole Porter, you can go just about everywhere from there. And Red Hot + Blue, the first in the 25-years-and-counting series of HIV/AIDS awareness compilations, goes everywhere. The twenty selections on this comp can be roughly divided into two categories, the reverent and the iconoclastic, both of which approach the material with the same respect but have different ways of showing it. The former category boasts some impressive moments of quiet reverie and carefree jauntiness: Annie Lennox goes torch-song cabaret with piano accompaniment on “Ev’rytime We Say Goodbye,” k.d. lang helms a smoky-cafe small-combo rendition of “So In Love,” Lisa Stansfield vamps saucily through a brass-filled big-band arrangement of “Down in the Depths,” and Jody Watley’s “After You, Who?” is pure cocktail-bar vocal-jazz sophistication. But the bulk of the collection strikes a certain chord of dawn-of-the-nineties pre-alternaboom genre-warping eclecticism, letting artists be themselves even as they engage with a giant of the canon. Engagements with hip-hop include rap&B rework “I’ve Got U Under My Skin” featuring new AIDS-crisis-themed lyrics by Neneh Cherry (“share your love, don’t share the needle”), a co-production by Jungle Brothers’ Afrika Baby Bam to be filed next to the Jungle Brothers’ own jimmy-hat-advocacy rewrite “I Get a Kick.” Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop’s punk-vet sardonicism updates “Well Did You Evah?” into a winking celebrity-casualty schmoozefest where they commiserate over missing out on a party at Pia Zadora’s house. David Byrne, deep in his international music ambassadorship, takes the origins of cowboy classic “Don’t Fence Me In” as a piece of the score for unproduced musical film Adios, Argentina and reintroduces it to the music of South America. And dance-pop covers by Jimmy Somerville (a hi-NRG-adjacent “From This Moment On”) and Erasure (“Too Darn Hot” as campy mutant New Jack Swing) prove you don’t have to futz with Porter’s lyrics to play up their queer undertones (or overtones). U2 fans might also appreciate their take on “Night and Day,” an early hint of the electronic futurist moves that Achtung Baby would signal as their next big phase.