Listening to a slow song? Put it down to ‘dark times’ (and other codswallop)

It’s rich pickings at the moment for doommongers, with Brexit still fuelling a misplaced conviction among many that we’re speeding towards hell in a handbasket. Naturally this age, like any, has some problems, but the latest story about our supposed collective misery signifies not new levels of horror in society, but new levels of silliness among some of its observers.

The prize for the least plausible doom-mongering of the week must go to a report about our new fondness for slower songs. According to a Floridabased music app developer, the tempo of hit music has slowed down to an average of 20 per cent of what it was in 2012.

The crooning likes of Adele and Ed Sheeran are thought to have set the trend, and now – having shed our former disco-bopping ways – we can’t get enough of dirge-like anthems.

Ludicrously, this change in preference is being explained by music industry veterans as a consequence of a deep social malaise. For Bonnie Mckee, a hit songwriter, the slower tempo mirrors a sorrowful world in which “people’s rights are being taken away”. The slower beats betray a reflective rather than an escapist mood, unlike during the financial crisis in 2008 when we craved “up-tempo stuff ”. Chris Hawkins, the BBC Radio 6 DJ, explained the slowdown in terms of the “dark times we live in” and our “frenetic lives”.

What utter rubbish. Tastes have a life of their own, and can change quite independently of “dark times”, Brexit-related or otherwise. We may also prefer slower music now because we’re simply bored of the inanity of speeding clubby beats, a function, perhaps, of the outrageous expense of clubbing these days. In times of economic uncertainty, going dancing must compete with the (cheaper) warmth and comforts of hearth, home and Game of Thrones.

Quite aside from the inanity of the idea that we’re collectively mourning a “social and moral” crisis, pinning contemporary taste in arts to a wider economic or political climate should be done with care.

In former periods, of course, the associations were clearer. The departure from the classical music of Mozart and early Beethoven to the heightened emotions of Brahms and Schumann was part and parcel of the birth of Romanticism. Dickens and Eliot reflected the obsession of Victorian society with social ills and mores. And the modernism of early-20th-century Europe represented a radical shake-up of old strictures and heralded a disturbing new age.

But globalisation has rendered such associations tenuous at best. That we loved Harry Potter in the Noughties was nothing to do with any effervescence at Tony Blair’s premiership. The obsession with Scandinavian noir over the past few years suggests less that our society is riddled with crime than that it was bloody good television.

Certainly, the vicissitudes of pop-song tempo is a truly silly place to look for clues to the collective mood – if such a thing exists. For unlike Beethoven and Brahms, the Adeles and the Ed Sheerans of the world are at the end of a long string of music industry marketeers, far more interested in what can be sold than in reflections of the moral climate.

The music industry should focus on what sounds nice, and leave the state of the world to others.