Slow, slow, quick, quick, but mostly slow

I wonder if officials at the passport office shudder as much as I do when I read the occupation - "singer songwriter". I wonder if  it  evokes images of  Nick Drake or Neil Young or the tortured writings of Ian Curtis or Kurt Cobain. Or does it, as seems to be the case, conjour up images of a dread locked acoustic guitarist called River baring his soul in a pub in Hoxton, bemoaning the loss of his girlfriend just 47 days before 9/11. The tragic death of 3198 people  in the Twin Towers paling into insignificance compared to the deterioration of  his 3 and a half hour relationship.
Everyone has a right to be who they want to be , we live after all in a democracy and no one has the right to dictate and tell people what they should or shouldn't do. We know that. It's been written. The problem here is the inability to tell someone that they're not very good. We have heard endless tales from celebrities how they have bravely overcome the stigma of being told they would never amount to anything, only to become one of the leading figure in their field. Louis Walsh excepted.
But for every failure to adhere to the mantra of "least likely to succeed", there's thousands more who really should have been forcibly rounded up and told in no uncertain terms; give up or your future kids will pay. We owe it to society to preserve all facets of the art world, the tortured singer songwriter being one of them.
The former Granada Reports and Factory Records owner Tony Wilson  once said that Joy Division were on stage because " they had no fucking choice". The idea that if they weren't on stage they'd either be dead or in jail. It's the only arena that these emotional beings can exist. Their feelings being  laid bare in front of 250 soles at the Rat and Parrott. The audience hanging on their every word because the singer/band are talking their language. They're talking of real issues that affect them , whether it be unemployment, insecurity, no money, not finding love or even just not being able to break the cycle of not getting a shag. The point is that these universal issues that are being used as a basis for the music the band/singer is making. The music, the lyrics, the mood and tempo all being in sync to create an atmosphere, a story, a feeling.
Now if there is one thing modern music likes is feelings. They like feelings so much that if they can't write about them they'll create them. Despite punk being all revolutionary in the 70's , the nightclubs were probably still spewing Rod Stewart and Emerson, Lake and Palmer onto the dance floor. Down the road your mates are pogoing to Buzzcocks in a dingy club, you're in Pzazz nightclub staring into the dregs of your Hofmeister waiting for some Earth, Wind and Fire. Anything to break the never ending mediocrity of prog rock.
I don't know how Disco music was invented, but Id like to think to think that a music producer was in Pzazz in 1970's and he was feeling the boredom on the dance floor and the next day he set about writing the blue print for up tempo dance music. I'm fairly sure it didn't happen that way but the most important thing is that it did happen. Whatever the circumstances dance music happened and as it evolved it began to combine the euphoria of being young and free with the introspective elements traditionally the preserve of blues,folk or country. Hometown Boy by Bronski Beat, a bench mark song about the pressures of being a young gay man in the 1980's running away  from his oppressive hometown wouldn't have worked if it had been sound tracked by pan pipes but with a thumping snyth/drum beat it perfectly encapsulated the song.
So how does all this all tie in with River singing about breaking a nail? Well they started it. They did when they realised that writing a song about your life is actually pretty fucking difficult. Something only a few can ever perfect and even fewer perfect over  career of ten or twenty plus years. So in needing to fulfil the criteria of being a tortured soul they need a song to sing. They haven't written one so the quickest route is to scour the charts history books looking for a song they can put their stamp on and in recent years it invariably means taking an upbeat 80's classic and beating the living shit out of it.
In the past few years we've had slowed down versions of You Spin Me Round, I Just Can't Get Enough and Teenage Kicks, the latter of which contains the line - " a teenage dream's so hard to beat", hardly the best representation of withdrawn misery. But the modern singer songwriter delivers these in such mournful, solemnity that the original lyrics  hardly matter. It doesn't matter that Cigarettes and Alcohol by Oasis was written in recognition of the joy of finishing work and getting paid and nailing  pints and fags on a Friday night. These days in the era of social awareness, Cigarettes and Alcohol is set in a dystopian wasteland where a figure dressed in a red riding hood outfit finds a discarded bottle of Jack Daniels and it signals a reminder of life before every one became teetotal after the great holocaustical Bacardi Breezer wars of 2015. She cries as she remembers life before humans became alcohol ravaged zombies and rather than sitting in  a park getting tans and talking nonsense started launching nuclear bombs. Then a deer wanders up to the young girl with a pub dart in it's foot. How could society do this?
If you're unlucky to be in the UK in  the run up to Xmas and you happen to watch television you'll see every song ever made being used in adverts sung with a world weariness and precious fragility completely out of keeping with the lyrics or mood of the song. Think "I'm Too Sexy" being sung by a man who's just been water boarded by the CIA. And yet advertisers love it. And the longer the machine continues to pump out pitched down versions of We Will Rock You sung by a nurse in a hospice, the more unlikely we are to see River and his kin singing about issues other than the dangers of E Cigarettes or poorly designed cycle paths. The greatest innovation in modern music won't be the invention of a new sound but the unanimous decision to let music be . As it is, untainted, perfect. Let It Be. Now there's a song that's way too fast.