When Quebec was fluorescent

What’s left to siphon off from the 1980s? Pretty much every movie I’ve loved from this decade has had new releases, its most iconic elements picked up from fashion or series like Stranger Things and we can no longer count the number of documentaries since the 2000s that look back on this era, high in fluorescent color and spray net. Proof that it is this generation that is in power today.

Yes, but … We never have enough tips that specifically look at the Quebec aspect of an era, since Quebec is a cultural exception that has its own star-system. This is a bit of what Tristan Demers and Jean-Sébastien Girard wanted to remedy with the book Quebec 80, designed during the pandemic, which has just been published by Éditions de l’Homme. “This book is a memory trigger, because it is a decade that has a particular identity and color”, summarizes Tristan Demers, who thus publishes, casually, his 71^e career book. “I speak a lot about memory to The evening is still young, adds Jean-Sébastien Girard, whose devouring love for the hits of the past is known to the show JS Tenderness. I went from 5 to 15 years in this decade, these are super important years during which we all build and experience first times. “

For my part, I went from 8 to 18 years old during the 1980s, with which I had to make peace. At 15, I renounced pastel colors and wore only black clothes, listening to The Cure while hating preppies forerunners of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho scored by Bret Easton Ellis. I hated those days that I found cheesy, and I felt like I had missed the big party of the century of the years 1960-1970. My nostalgic fiber for this hated period only woke up when I understood that it was about a world now bygone, pre-internet, a little naive, and that, despite my resistance, I was there. belonged. These are my childhood and my teenage years after all. “It’s a decade that was abused for a while because we had no hindsight, agrees Tristan Demers. We made fun of a lot of things, everything seemed to us a bad taste. And that is why Jean-Sébastien Girard conducts interviews with celebrities (Janette Bertrand, Guy Mongrain, Jean-Claude Poitras, Sonia Benezra, Jean-Pierre Coallier, Martine St-Clair, etc.) who can today admit some stuff. “They gave tons of interviews on the same topics, but they can say something else today,” he explains. Like René Simard, for example, who admits that he was a bit of a sausage factory and that he made too many records! ”

Of course, I recognized just about everything in Quebec 80, whose layout is reminiscent of magazines Wow! Where Today’s Girls with tons of thumbnails, even if I find that it lacks a bit of the counter-culture of those crazy years.

But Demers and Girard really wanted to make a popular book, and because it casts a really wide net – fashion, gadgets, techno, food, TV, music, toys, movies and shows – it’s inevitable that there is a lack of readers like me who would buy a beautiful 300-page book just on the soap opera Rooms in town. Maybe it will be for another book, because they are thinking about it, since they have cut at least 40% of material so that Quebec 80 be offered at an affordable price. “Whether we like it or not, it’s popular culture that builds us collectively and awakens memories,” Demers believes. When we remember that time, it was not necessarily the underground play at Espace Go that had upset us! ”

They had to do that with the means of the Quebec edition too. The big puzzle of such a book is to free the rights of the images, explain Demers and Girard to me who worked like mad to obtain, for example, photos of the “special Nathalie Simard” Smarties or Mr. T, because using the official images of Pac-Man or Donkey Kong costs a small fortune.

What kind of people have become of those who grew up in the 80s? “It’s this generation X that we don’t talk about much, stuck between boomers and millennials,” believes Tristan Demers. And not necessarily a nostalgic generation, because Jean-Sébastien Girard does not define himself as such, even if he is watching all the episodes of the soap opera Ladies of heart. “I like to hang out with the past, it moves me and it makes me happy, it reminds me of my childhood and I obviously had a beautiful childhood. It amuses me, but I’m not backward-looking, I don’t think “my God, it was better in my time”. I don’t dream of reliving the 80s, I really like the time we are in, even if it too is imperfect. ”

In any case, everyone the two authors spoke to are nostalgic for one thing in particular for the 1980s: a certain freedom, which includes the freedom to crash without receiving death threats on the web. It may be covered one day in a book on the 2020s …

Tristan Demers and Jean-Sébastien Girard will be at the Book Fair on November 26 and 27.

Quebec 80

Tristan Demers and Jean-Sébastien Girard

Man’s editions

144 pages