Queen Dance Traxx I.

It must be weird for dead pop stars. As soon as they kick the bucket and head off to heaven or hell or wherever, the public can't seem to get enough of them. So they watch while their record company scrambles to meet the demand with endless compilations, reissues, and posthumous recordings finished by surviving members and accountants. If a dead pop star belched 20 years ago and somebody's got it on tape, it ends up in the shops showcased by a spiffy new mix.

Something like this has already happened to Queen's Freddie Mercury, but it seems the gods have decreed that last year's exploitation album, including a previously unreleased recording of Freddie crooning "Too Much Love Will Kill You" with all the strength he had left in him, wasn't enough torture for a man who died of AIDS complications, No, the poor Queen and all us queens have to endure what in the past few years has become an inevitable consequence of enduring popularity--the tribute album.

The idea of covering an album's worth of Queen songs is particularly ballsy. More than nearly any other band, Queen defined the character of each song not just by the melody, the chords, and the lyrics but also by the lavishness of the arrangement and the extravagance of the performance. The absurdity of taking Queen songs out of their original context has already been proved with the recent hip-hop harmony version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" by the Braids, a pair of would-be En Voguers who first recorded the outrageously demanding tune as a demo tape to flaunt their substantial skills and ended up with a radio hit--the kind that stops you dead in your tracks because you can't believe what you're hearing.

Because the Braids' "Bohemian Rhapsody" is so irreverent, so Fugee-contemporary, and so well sung, the culture clash works. The same cannot be said about Passing Open Windows, an instrumental album of orchestral Queen interpretations. The album is masterminded by David Palmer, the ex-Jethro Tull member responsible for turning the prog rock of his former band into pseudoclassical, mush as well as creating bad-taste follow-ups such as The Symphonic Music of Yes. You can probably guess what he does to Queen, a band that specialized in creating orchestral effects by overdubbing dozens of distorted guitars and for years boasted "No synthesizers!" in their liner notes. He takes what was playful and extraordinary and makes it laughably serious and terribly ordinary, not to mention unimaginative. Releasing an album of Queen favorites orchestralstyle is like organizing a tribute album to gangsta rapper Eazy-E and asking only real-life gangsters to the studio.

Not so obvious is Queen Dance Traxx I, an import-only album of Europop dance groups doing all sorts of sacrilegious things to Queen hits, even sampling the original recordings. Although gays know this music belongs to the hi-NRG tradition invented in their own amyl-soaked clubs, to the rest of the world, it's the most mainstream pop in existence.

But when listeners make the connection between the Sylvester-derived '90s disco offered here and Freddie's own sexuality, Queen Dance Traxx I makes sense as a gay reappropriation. It doesn't matter if nobody knows the sexual orientation of album contributors Mr. President, Captain Jack, Music Instructor, Masterboy, and E-Rotic: To our camp-conscious American ears, they sound queer, and that's what matters.

With such an array of acts offering every known-flavor variation of Eurocheese, it's hard to pick favorites, but, as the saying goes, le cream always rises to le top. E-Rotic--a boy-girl duo that regularly scores hits in Europe with such tasteful ditties as "Fritz Loves My Tits"--tackles "Who Wants to Live Forever" as an operatic ballad before busting out with the expected rave-ready beats. Mr. President and Masterboy deliver what are in the context of this wildly shameless project relatively straightforward renditions of "A Kind of Magic" and "I Want to Break Free." But it's Blumchen who steals the show with her fabulously frantic gallop through "Bicycle Race." The Europop equivalent of speed-metal is enough to give a dead man a heart attack. You can practically hear Freddie shrieking with laughter and horror.