Soul music
Jude Rogers captures music’s ability to make the worst of times better and the best of times better still, writes John Aizlewood
Why does music affect us in so many different ways? It is a question that is almost unanswerable. After all, music is less a meritocracy, more something that’s in the ear of the beholder. If someone is more moved, their life more enhanced, by Russ Abbot’s “Atmosphere” rather than Joy Division’s, then so be it.
In The Sound of Being Human, music journalist Jude Rogers rather attempts to grasp the ungraspable, then, as she attempts to explain “where music can take us, how music can affect us and shape us”.
The book is partly a deeply personal memoir, a comforting love letter to the five-year-old Rogers, who finds out her father Roy has just unexpectedly died, shortly after wondering what next week’s No 1 single will be. For Roy Rogers’ child, music would become both a balm and the springboard to a successful career.
Each chapter is titled after a song that played a part in Rogers’ life, from the peerless (Abba’s Super Trouper) to music writer staples (REM’S Drive, Prefab Sprout’s I Trawl The Megahertz), via the inevitable and inevitably self-conscious curveball (Flying Pickets’ Only You). Rogers excels at showing how every fibre of her being is entwined around her adoration of music.
She notes that music invariably attends the pivotal moments – good and bad – of our lives and that, as the years pass, it leads us back to them.
For her, it’s Toots & the Maytals’ Pressure Drop as the backdrop to a friend’s funeral or a pregnant Neneh Cherry performing Buffalo Stance on Top of the Pops and instantly becoming a role model. Along her way, there is a miscarriage, a kindly husband, a baby boy and the overpowering sense that music can make the worst of times better and the best of times better still.
The chapter titled after a so-so Kate Bush song, Among Angels is one of the most powerful. After the traumatic birth of her son, during which she experienced visions of her father, Rogers is a struggling firsttime mother, weeping as Bush plays the song, while fretting for her boy. It is a desperately moving moment and, when she later reflects upon it, a cathartic one: “I could let my father support me, but I could also carry on with my life.”
Along with being a personal account, the book is also, with the help of a motley crew of experts and faux experts, a more objective, sometimes academic attempt to explain music’s unerring capacity to move and connect, mostly via neuroscience and physiology.
Having eloquently made the case for subjectivity by illustrating the highly personal nature of her attachments to her chosen songs, Rogers seeks