one word... wtf?

These are strange days indeed for pop music. Everybody seems to have almost forgotten that rock music is the new cool and instead everybody wants to be a gangster. Which can only make matters worse.

Anyway, back onto my chosen topic... It would appear Kelly Osbourne has decided to ditch her rock chick image (let's face it, with tunes like 'shut up' it never washed anway) in favour of a (drum roll please)... Some sort of eighties electro divadom. 'One Word' sounds nothing like anything you would expect from Kelly, in that it sounds kinda like it was produced by Ladytron, or even more accurately Visage's 'Fade To Grey' for the 2005 pop charts.

That said, it's not particularly amazing or anything, it just seems odd that the PR department at her label decided THIS was the way to go... What IS disappointing is the fact that Felix Da Housecat (once again, bizarrely) was on hand to remix Kelly and her dad's duet, 'Changes', yet is nowhere to be seen here. 'One Word' is much more Felix's thing and could definately do with a stripped down version that's lost some of Ms. Osbourne's vocals.

Won't get fooled again...

A few weeks ago something bad happened in the cosmos and blackplastic's external hard drive with all of blackplastic's music on got corrupted. Eight thousand songs lost.

Eight thousand.

More than a month's worth of music vanished.

Now what really riled blackplastic was not the loss. It is the arrogance of a certain online music retailer who doesn't let you re-download music you have legally purchased from them. blackplastic cannot see the sense in this at all... What harm could it cause? Apple suggest backing up music purchased from them on a regular basis. So in other words, when I pay my extortionate 79 pence for a song, as soon as I have downloaded it, if I want to be sure I don't lose it I should burn it to a CD, costing me additional money, where it will sit in a case with no artwork in case something goes wrong.

Frankly most online music stores are a blatant rip off. blackplastic will continue to use the iTunes music store to listen to clips of music that it is thinking about buying in hard copy but until it gets a lot cheaper, it won't be spending much money there.

Fancy a refreshing change? Head on over to http://www.emusic.com. blackplastic doesn't know whether it will let you re-download previous purchases since the external hard drive is still not sorted and as such blackplastic isn't buying any music. What blackplastic does know is that the music is in mp3 format (no wma files here please!) and features no drm encoding and, best of all, is cheap as chips and the site has a free trial... Can't say fairer than that can you?