The Sound of Being Human by Jude Rogers

I put The Sound of Being Human on my birthday wish list because I really enjoy books about music. It turned out that being a book about music was just the start of its appeal. It is by turns a heartfelt autobiography, a flick through Jude Rogers’ record collection, an introduction to the structure and chemistry of the brain and a psychological journey into the phenomenon of this amazing gift called music. Any one of those parts would have made this a very interesting read, but put together it became a book that me laugh, made me emotional and made me think in a way that few other books have done. It was written with humour and beauty that made me take Jude Rogers to my heart in a way that I was quite unprepared for.

Let’s start with the autobiography. It details Jude’s journey from her childhood as she discovered the power of music. The death of her father, who is a continuing presence in her musical life, is dealt with beautifully, sensitively and with quiet courage, both in this book and in her life. We learn how she discovered Wham’s greatest song – Freedom of course! – while tying her shoelace, her introduction to Abba whilst standing at the sink in her grandmother’s house and her love for Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance alongside her love for Smash Hits. In many 80s set books these cultural touchstones seem like a checklist of the songs, groups and magazines that have to be namechecked for the purpose of the audience. Here, Jude Rogers cleverly both foregrounds and backgrounds the songs so that her own stories become the focus of the reader’s attention. By doing this, she is able to bring fresh life to them. She explains her reaction to hearing Freedom for the first time by looking at it in musical terms, and her reaction as a 6 year old infant school pupil absolutely mirrored mine, even though I was hearing it as a 19 year old just about to go into the Royal Air Force! It brought home to me the universality of music where age upbringing and personal circumstances are of little consequence once a song has captured your imagination.

The chapters are arranged as a playlist and each song is considered in depth as its importance in her life. However, it is also considered in term of its effect on the physiology of the brain and its psychology. Although she is not an expert, as she freely admits, her reading and her contacts are both wide-ranging and the way she puts some of these difficult concepts across is an object lesson to writers in terms of making them accessible to a non-expert audience. For example, she introduced me to the term anhedonia, a word and indeed a concept I was completely unfamiliar with, and within a few sentences outlined what it meant. Oh, and she included a joke that made me laugh on the train – a rare feat! She also reflected on the time when music stopped working for her, something I have been trying to explain to myself in vain, and a subject I reflected on myself only this week, far less eloquently. https://davidgpearce205.wordpress.com/2023/03/30/reviewers-block/

I have rarely read a book that has affected me in so many ways. I followed Jude’s journey with her, feeling the highs and lows keenly as, in some ways, the events reflected my own. Even when they didn’t I was emotionally involved throughout. It was also endlessly fascinating on an intellectual level, to the extent that I even started highlighting parts of the text to investigate the concepts and the academics involved! Finally, it introduced me to songs that I have never heard before and which I will definitely be listening to in the near future once music starts working again.

I would usually say that this book will appeal to one audience or another depending on their interests. In the case of The Sound of Being Human I will, instead, say that this is for anyone who is human as it simply speaks to all of us.