Re: Velvet Underground tribute

Coming out in September is a Velvets tribute album called, of course, I'll Be Your Mirror. Exec produced by the late Hal Willner. The lineup:

I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground and Nico
1. Sunday Morning – Michael Stipe (3:50)
2. I’m Waiting For The Man – Matt Berninger (3:44)
3. Femme Fatale – Sharon Van Etten (w/ Angel Olsen on backing vocals) (4:43)
4. Venus In Furs – Andrew Bird & Lucius (6:55)
5. Run Run Run – Kurt Vile & The Violators (6:59)
6. All Tomorrow’s Parties – St. Vincent & Thomas Bartlett (4:52)
7. Heroin – Thurston Moore feat. Bobby Gillespie (7:24)
8. There She Goes Again – King Princess (3:29)
9. I’ll Be Your Mirror – Courtney Barnett (2:27)
10. The Black Angel’s Death Song – Fontaines D.C. (3:12)
11. European Son – Iggy Pop & Matt Sweeney (7:45)

I haven't heard Willner's T. Rex tribute album, but it seems like most folks think he botched it. Hopefully this one is better, though I'll confess to not being that interested in tribute albums these days.

A Hal Willner tribute album? VU covers..? as Killing Joke sang,"we're living in the '80s!"

Forgive my sarcastic sarcasm, but despite the late, great Mr. Willner's mostly stellar track record, and my deep love of the Velvets, I don't have high hopes for this. The '80s VU revival lead them to getting covered so often that it was almost like you had no college radio credibility if you didn't. Do we need any more? And what was so great about Hal Willner albums was that he usually saluted overlooked artists or genres (Kurt Weil, Disney songs, sea shantys) and then got some fairly unlikely artists to cover them, sometimes in odd-but-wonderful combinations, e.g. Ringo Starr & Herb Albert's "When You Wish Upon A Star." But here, we got the singer for REM, a band that covered at least four VU tunes in their day, and the guy from Sonic Youth who pretty built their sound on the Velvets mighty roar. Not very creative choices. But we'll see...

This list of artists (most of whom I like) looks like a bid for airplay on Triple A radio. How about taking some chances, like, say, a doom metal version of "I'm Waiting for the Man" or a song based on a Velvets sample rather than a cover version?

What a conservative effort. This is why we can’t have nice things.