Where I’m from in North Mississippi, cars and music just go together. Just about everybody I know got a “old-school”—a pre-1990, domestic car that always needs just a little bit of work to get back on the road. And if it ain’t a old-school, it's probably got sounds, custom-installed subs that makes the bass sound far away and tweeters that make the hi-hat seem right beside you.
I always thought it was a rule: When you drive, you supposed to make folks listen.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been spending so much time on the new app Drive & Listen—it taps into two things that just go together. The app allows you to take a virtual drive through more than 50 cities around the world while listening to real-time local radio and the sounds of street life as you go. It’s like Google Streetview, but the virtual reality version, and you don’t have to click to move.
And there’s music. You can drive, then coast, through Mumbai while listening to what folks listen to in Mumbai. Or St. Petersburg to “Sweet Dreams.” Or Biscayne Boulevard to Bad Bunny.
Erkam Şeker, the Turkish graduate student who created Drive & Listen, says the idea was born from pandemic-induced nostalgia for driving around Istanbul with the radio on. “I realized that other people around the world must be missing that same experience of being on the road,” he told Lonely Planet.
He must have been thinking of folks like me. In this last year of teleworking and a world closed down, I have found a strange comfort in just driving around, with no direction or purpose other than…driving and listening.
The app is oddly addictive. When you first visit, you briefly see black and white TV static. Then, as if someone has changed the channel, you see a full screen shot of a street somewhere, and the footage (and you) are rolling. You might be rolling to a stop at a red light in the central business district of Buenos Aires, or rolling onto a nondescript street in Prague. Then the radio stream loads, and all of a sudden there is that unmistakable feeling of moving through the world, trying to get from where you are to where you’re going. I think that is partly why I’ve been on the site so much.
It feels not exactly real, but close to what you remember as real.
One of the tricks to creating a (quasi) VR experience is making sure the virtual world mimics the real one. Objects and distances have to be the right sizes and dimensions. Not too big. Not too far away. Not too high off the ground. Drive & Listen accomplishes that with uncanny consistency. Almost all of the driving footage is shot in crystal-clear 4K, and whether you’re in Rome or Chicago, the view is driver’s-eye level. As you move forward, you see and feel the road disappear beneath you. A car appears from your blind spot. The radio goes from song to song to advertisement. Was that a Bank of America on my left? Street signs are clearest when you’re closest.
The appeal of Drive & Listen isn’t just that it mimics the feeling of being in a car with the radio on. It’s that it makes you feel like you’re in control, or something close to it. To pick a city, you just scroll and click. Don’t like where you start out at first? Click the city’s name again and you’ll begin at a different place on the route. (Most places have two or three alternate starting points.) And each city offers at least a few streaming options. You can listen to local radio, ESPN, or NPR; or you can stop the radio completely and drive without listening if (for some reason) that's what you prefer.
You can also decide how fast you want to go, and whether you want to hear what it sounds like outside, the roar of wind and hum of car engines, people blowing their horns at other people unnecessarily. And if all else fails, you can always just trade one place for another.
That’s how a few minutes on Drive & Listen can quickly turn into more time than you planned: because a trip to Mumbai can quickly turn into stops in St. Petersburg and Beijing. If not London, Prague. If not Paris, Tokyo. And that is the real magic of the app: It stretches a familiar thing—driving and listening—to an unfamiliar place. It makes the world feel far away while at the same time right beside you, or in front of you. We’ve all stopped for folks walking on a crosswalk, pretending to not be watching them watch us. Drive & Listen feels familiar like that, even if the crosswalk is in Havana and you’re pretending not to watch while tipping in a old-school, lime-green Plymouth Belvedere.
Dr. B. Brian Foster is a writer and sociologist from Mississippi.
