Generous geekiness: The sound of being human

 

There’s a lovely line in Jude Rogers’ new book, The Sound of Being Human, as she remembers how she papered her teenage bedroom with pictures of pop stars. She describes: “faces that made my connection to music human, faces that I stared at like a baby, trying to understand the new realms they represented.”

I don’t think a male music writer would have thought of "stared like a baby” but it’s a great simile. And as a female music lover (and one time music writer) it makes me happy to see women writers doing things in a distinctively female way.

It also made me happy reading about Jude’s journey into music journalism. She discovered Smash Hits aged ten and saw that “girls played a huge part in this universe” – on the pages and  on the staff – adding with hindsight, “I didn’t realise how wonderful this was at the time.”

Her own music journalism career started slowly, watching the traditional journalists-as-gatekeepers culture, not knowing that the writers could be women, finding out later. “Women soared in music journalism history too, but they were often hidden behind the search engine algorithms.”

And as music journalists started to compete with online commentators, and voices got louder, she found her own way of doing things.

Another aspect of this book that’s distinctive is that it’s a strange thing, a memoir (of sorts) that’s quite lacking in ego. This appears to be something she learnt as a journalist, discovering “what the best kind of music journalism should be… about properly listening to the songs and using your words to help get them heard.”

The author’s own story is in the book throughout – touchingly centred on the “geeky connection” about pop music between her childhood self and the father who died when she was five – but so are a lot of other stories.

She tells the stories of the musicians she cares about, the musicians she has met, the people in her life, the people she has interviewed for the book. It’s a generous kind of geekiness.

It’s all part of an exploration about how humans and music fit together, taking in neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, sociology, art criticism and academic studies of “fandom”.

Here are some of the facts I particularly enjoyed:

Babies can remember music they hear in the womb (it’s been proved).

The processing of our identities and the processing of music happen in the same part of our brain.

The oldest discovered musical instrument is 60,000 years old.

Babies are more likely to be soothed by an adult singing than an adult speaking. (And this is why we talk to babies in a different way: “infant directed speech” aka IDS is more musical than speech directed at adults.)

Kraftwerk happened because post-war German musicians wanted to revisit the electronic avant-garde of the 1920s to distance themselves from the Nazis.

And there are things called “reminiscence bumps” – the periods of our lives in which we recall songs most vividly.

All this is part of the quest to find out “why music holds so much power for people”. It’s an investigation that covers love, family, identity, dancing, writing, motherhood, daughterhood, grief, dementia, dying, memory, belonging and healing, either through Jude’s own story or through other people’s.

And it comes back to the memory of her five-year-old self and her father, as described in the introduction: “We were rooting for the two of us to be people for whom songs were extensions of their ordinary lives.”

That’ll be all of us, then.

PS Here’s another fact. 95% of humans get pleasure from music. Jude calls the rest (jokingly, she wants you to know) “Tory culture ministers”.