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Here’s a question that the comments section bickers about every time I run a review of a helmet communicator system: Should you listen to music while riding, or shouldn’t you?
On the NAY side, we have people who say it distracts them, or that it influences them to ride unsafely—too much techno through your Sena, and the cops will end up having to pull you over for grossly extra-legal speeds.
On the YEA side, we have people who say there’s a time and a place for almost everything, and that includes music while motorcycling. This is the camp I fall into myself—I’ve ridden big miles with music, and without, and I prefer to at least have the option.
Let me be clear on one thing: If you’re the kind of person who runs their bike’s speakers full-volume all the time and subjects the rest of the world to your butt rock at every gas station, and all over town on a hot summer day… please stop. We need less people like you. Your helmet audio should be enough. Photo: Serhii Shcherbyna/Shutterstock.com
I am pretty sure that the first time I ever rode with music was a fairly significant trip I took to the next province over, headed to my first grown-up job interview on a Honda Silver Wing. I can’t remember what cassette I had in the dash, but I can definitely remember that it took the edge off the superslab…. and that the home-rewound charging system couldn’t keep up with the load, and I had to bump-start the machine a few hours later, in a mall parking lot. Ah, the joys of youth.
Years later, I remember the first Cardo I had; the direct-wire connection to my MP3 player was finicky and it was extremely frustrating to have your tunes switch off mid-ride when something came unplugged. The radio was better; in 2013, when I went across the States in a comm-equipped Schuberth C3 Pro, I remember highly enjoying the local radio stations along the route. I got a good feeling for the pulse of the communities I was passing through, and it was a good way to hear some different music that I normally wouldn’t have been exposed to, either. I have fond memories of cruising through the Midwest and South listening to some old-timey country music broadcast that wasn’t mainstream enough to hit the charts in Canada (was it WWVA, perhaps?).
So, I think one benefit of music-while-riding is discovery of your surroundings. If I was traveling through some country where the culture and language was completely foreign to me, I imagine that effect would be magnified a lot more.
The second biggest benefit is obvious—music can take the edge off the highway slog. I used to have a regular two-hour commute on a four-lane highway, and I think I might have gone mad without something to break up the tedium. We all want to explore, ride and tour on twisty back roads and wilderness gravel and single-track, but the reality is that a lot of us spend wayyyyy too much time on the superslab. Music helps here.
The third reason I like to listen to music in my helmet is—I have made some great memories this way.
You know that feeling, when you hear a song and it brings you back to a time and place? I have songs that I associate with great motorcycling trips. One Headlight by the Wallflowers—before I ever had a helmet comm, I used to bellow that into the inside of my full-face as I roared home late at night, half frozen, grabbing the exhaust headers with my gloved hands at stop signs, just to warm my fingers. It was sort of a whistling-past-the-graveyard deal, willing my decrepit old UJM to not break down—we can make it home with one headliiiiiighhtttt…..
Just as finding a photo of a past trip can bring back memories, so can hearing a song. Best of Blur, or Achtung Baby, will always remind me of a trip I did to the Cabot Trail years ago, exploring the corners of the Cape Breton Highlands before COVID-19 changed our world forever. Photo: SamiL/Shutterstock.com
I doubt Jakob Dylan was talking about bikes when he wrote that song, though. But maybe he was. His father certainly was a motorcyclist, and whenever I hear Maggie’s Farm or Quinn the Eskimo, I think about a trip I did around through Cape Breton years ago. I knew I’d be outside mobile data range, far from cell towers, and I downloaded some Dylan collection to my phone, along with Best of Blur and U2’s Achtung Baby. I ran the Cabot Trail back and forth with these on repeat. The songs from all those albums remind me of the corners around Cheticamp now, and I’m glad to have those memories. Somehow, I think the music helped imprint them in my brain.
I think that, generally speaking, we’ve become too enamored with the idea of a backing soundtrack in our day-to-day lives. The radio, Muzak, and now earbuds—we’ve effectively signal-jammed the background sounds of life, and I am certain that some future psychology study will show that we’ve turned our brains to mush by over-stimulation in the Information Age, and excessive exposure to canned music will be a contributing factor.
But, if one day I can no longer ride a motorcycle, but I can hear a song that reminds me of corners, of acceleration, and time spent with friends on two wheels—I think the music will still be worth it in the end.
Trail Break runs on the first Monday of every month, unless Zac forgets about it, or gets worked up about something in the days in-between scheduled columns …
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