THOUGHTS
I've Had The Time of My Life, Haven't I? Cassandra Bristow
The first thing I did when I reentered New York City was cry. It wasn’t necessarily my fault. In the passenger seat of a car where I’d spent most of my high school years, “(I’ve Had The) Time of My Life” from the classic film “Dirty Dancing” came on. Of course, that isn’t what got me so teary-eyed; it was how the song happened to do so the second I hit the Brooklyn Bridge. A song that made my mother roll her eyes for its “general schmaltziness” had me blubbering all the way back to my first apartment, the apartment I had left behind in March due to the Coronavirus pandemic. I had been, as we all were, displaced, but it hadn’t felt real until Bill Medley’s voice filled the small vehicle. The city I was entering, the city I’d wanted to feel like my city for so long, would never feel the same. My emotional experience with such a peppy, pop-trash 80s song is not out of the ordinary. Music is strongly associated with memory and our ability to recall specific events. The power of music is its ability to personalize any experience; the second you’ve found a melody to attach to a person, place or thing, it’s
done. That’s why there are songs we can’t listen to anymore because they remind us of pain. That’s why there are songs we listen to everytime we feel triumphant: because we associate it with happy victories. I bet you can think of a song right now that would make you cry if you were driving across the Brooklyn Bridge; a song that had once encapsulated you having the time of your life. This one wormed its way into mine when I stopped being the girl from my hometown. It was after my transition into the girl who lived in Brooklyn with her two best friends. We would listen to the song and dance together, barefoot on our hardwood floors. Screaming, laughing, singing, jumping. Something was ending to let something greater begin. I felt savvy and omnipotent. Generally, that savvy omnipotence is an accessible feeling for all music listeners. A study conducted by Norman M. Weinberger in 2006 showed that music triggers dopamine hits in the frontal and temporal lobes, which are also associated with memory. Simply put, when we find a song we enjoy listening to, we tend to listen to it on repeat because of that dopamine 15
