It's not immediately obvious what the connection is between the painfully vague self-help sloganeering of 'Let It Be Mine' and the still-swept-under-the-carpet issue of violent relationships, but Rachel's song is spearheading a new campaign "to create a UK chart hit to help stop domestic abuse and sexual violence."

      Repeated viewings of the song's miserable video prompt a guilty pondering of how satisfying it would feel to crunch the back of an acoustic guitar into Daniel Rachel's little Fame Academy face, but the project is validated in that all profits go to Tender, the anti-domestic abuse arts organisation.

      In the 50-year-old pantheon of pop music, formulated largely for housewives and teenage girls, very few songs have really engaged with domestic violence. The first was probably The Crystals' monumentally contentious 1962 Top 100 hit, 'He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)', written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and produced by iconoclastic abuser and alleged murderer of women Phil Spector.

      Ironically, in the same week that legendary wife-beater Ike Turner finally slid down the trapdoor to Hades – to confused obituaries fanfaring his invention of rock n roll, but unsure how to negotiate the extra-musical innovations he inflicted on Tina Turner's body - a new compilation of King/Goffin compositions has been released, featuring classics from The Everley Brothers and Skeeter Davis, but intriguingly, no Crystals.

      King and Goffin wrote 'He Hit Me' about their babysitter and 'The Locomation' singer, Little Eva, who was persistently battered by her husband. When asked why she endured the abuse, Eva simply responded that the pounding of her man's fists confirmed his love for her. As a protest song it's somewhat ambiguous. The Crystals trill Goffin's words in unison over King's haunting arrangement, a choir of denying angels, the brutal kiss-off 'He hit me and it felt like a kiss/He hit me but it didn't hurt me' sounding barbaric in their soul-women mouths.

      The girl-group themselves professed to be revolted by the song; it was perceived as promoting spousal abuse, and therefore quickly withdrawn. Critics have suggested that in a more understanding age, with a more understanding producer, 'He Hit Me' could have passed as satire, and the song was favourably resurrected this year by Brooklyn hipsters Grizzly Bear with their cover. Previously it was reappropriated by Courtney Love's Hole, who lambasted Carole King as an enemy of feminism.

      In a post-girl power pop climate, though, such as modern R&B, where the diva is queen, it's disappointing that only Aaliyah and Jacket Jackson have addressed violent relationships, abstractly, in little-remembered album tracks.

      In art rock, gay male artists like Xiu Xiu and Antony Hegarty have rendered songs that are almost spitefully submissive, laying the awfulness of the abusing party in the song as absolutely naked as it can be to present a very deliberate, pointed idea about violence in relationships.

      In this context, unnerving music like 'He Hit Me' can be loaded, subversive – almost vengeful – and not just another footnote in the disgrace of Spector's legacy. It's worth bearing in mind that at the time of its creation, beloved pop aristocracy like The Beatles, Elvis and Buddy Holly were getting away with unironic vows in chart hit lines like "I'd rather see you dead, little girl/Than to be with another man".

      "In Tender education workshops," says Daniel Rachel, "I was shocked as others in discovering that 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime." 

      Violence in relationships is as destructively unspoken as ever. But however objectionable and complicated songs like 'He Hit Me' are, their existence at least screams through kitchen radios and homes for more debate, more acknowledgement of domestic abuse than the antiseptic, meaning-free posturing of Tender's current frontman.