DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE - 3600 - Gay Lesbian Bi Trans News

With distance—as in life and love—those things that once felt tired and overplayed, at some point feel pleasant and fresh in hindsight if it was good in the first place. It might take you a year, a decade or just a month to feel "he wasn't so bad after all." Same goes for music. Especially in the DJ world where for every one time you hear a track, we hear it nightly or even multiple times nightly if the track is hot. So you put it aside in its little music prison until you feel it's had its rest time and you can reintroduce it into your set, either as retro or kitsch. Like in love, some can come back after a year or two; some need longer, depending on how overplayed the song was and how low the artist wants to lay so that you welcome them back with open arms. Seeing as it's a new year, plus it's a time when Valentine's opens our hearts to thaw and love again, here are a few things I think it's time to bring back.

Timbaland & Missy Elliott have been lying very low on the radar for the past few years. There was a time you couldn't avoid their sound either as artists or producers. Many have cried for Missy to make a full-fledged comeback for years, but Timba hasn't been gone as long. Like Diddy, Timba overplayed his hand with a series of sound-the-same solo albums. His producing of misguided albums for Duran Duran and Soundgarden's Chris Cornell made it worse. Now he's working his way back with stunning work on the show Empire and that same sound from the last decade sounds fresh. Bring it, and bring Nelly Furtado with you.

On that note, Nelly Furtado and Shakira, who both started out as more of your Alanis Morrisette-influenced college girls, found great success going to the pop extreme. Both have had hits and misses and seem to have worn out their welcome and sound in this arena. Here's hoping both of them bring it down a notch on their next ventures and find that more stripped-down sound that works on their voices instead of drowning them out.

Lady Gaga's last pop album wore very thin on even the most loyal of Monsters. She never really grew from her original sound, just kept adding onto it like an aural hoarder until we all snapped and said, "Take a break, Lady." Like Prince in the '80s though, you couldn't tell her stop. She smartly did a jazz vocal side project with Tony Bennett that didn't feel like another LG album, but more like that of an alter ego. So now, we can stretch out and play "Edge of Glory" and "Paparazzi" again and wonder what she's up to next. Recently there was an unconfirmed demo leaked that sounds like the same old crap. Hoping it was just that�—old crap—and that LG will see the light and take a new direction.

Not everyone comes back. I don't see any fondness for Alanis, Seal, Spin Doctors or Hootie and the Blowfish on the horizon, but who knows what time and space will bring. Maybe Limp Bizkit will be next year's new hot thing again. Nah.

THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985