The past is a point of reference – you have to understand where you come from to understand where you are going, as the saying goes – but as soon as you idealize it, I get suspicious. Nostalgia is a strange feeling, which can animate as much a reactionary who misses the good old days when women were at home as a nice guy like rapper FouKi who praises the 1980s in his new song 80’swhen he was born in the 1990s.
During my interview with FouKi, I made him laugh, because I couldn’t help telling him that it wasn’t so fun that, the 1980s. I was there. I hated this all-neon fashion and the spray net that made me suffocate in the girls’ toilets at school, those synthesizers that invaded the music. It took two months to receive the album that we wanted to listen to so much, we were swimming in the midst of post-referendum depression, all the teachers were telling us that we weren’t going to have a job, and we were terribly afraid of the nuclear bomb. It was the Reagan and Thatcher years that produced “American psychos” like Trump in Bret Easton Ellis’ novel. In short, zero nostalgia on my side.
But those were the years of my adolescence, often the most significant of our lives. I wasted them complaining about not having lived in the 1960s: the Quiet and Sexual Revolution, the feminist wave, the national awakening, the great social movements, Expo 67, scientific development and trips to the Moon. ..
I had the impression of arriving after a big party which I had just missed. In comparison, the 1980s in which I was stuck seemed to me of an absolute platitude – and of an assumed bad taste never reached in the history of humanity.
I look at pictures of myself at 14, with my perm, my rose-colored glasses and my grandma’s dress with shoulder pads, and I look older than I do.
Like FouKi, I idealized a period which had preceded me and which I could not know. To grow old is to see young people tripping on the time of your adolescence when you were moping and seeing that they only kept the publicity cliché. I find it very funny that this ended up happening to me, because I wouldn’t have bet big on this decade while I was there. It is clear that those who pull the strings of power today are people of my generation and that they permeate the surrounding culture. Because they produce or direct series like Stranger Things Or The Last of Us and impose the soundtrack, successes of yesteryear like Running up That Hill by Kate Bush and never let me down by Depeche Mode are at the top of teen playlists. I really like this type of transfer, and I take this opportunity to remind you that Depeche Mode, Madonna and Metallica will pass through Montreal this year during their tours.
Do young people today fantasize about the 1980s because the litany of the good old days is shoved down their throats or is it downright the era that is nostalgic? There’s always a limit to squeezing the lemon out of a period, and I think nostalgia is a lure; the past is safe only because it is over and we have survived it.
I learned a lesson from my stepfather Mo, who was a lifelong hippie, when he bawled me out about the 1960s that I raved about. It wasn’t if the fun than that, he also recalled. Not true that everyone had flowers in the hair, did you have to be silly. The hippies were a minority. He was often insulted and threatened because he wore long hair, it was also years of repression, the war in Vietnam, beatings at Saint-Jean, racial segregation and political assassinations (the Kennedys , Martin Luther King and Malcolm X). The great genius of the series madmen is to have reframed this era by evacuating nostalgia.
A good film to describe this permanent dissatisfaction with the times in which we live is Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen. The main character, who would so much have liked to live in the era of the writers of the “lost generation” – the Ernest Hemingways, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein – finds himself catapulted among them by a space-time passage, only to discover that these artists would have liked to live in the time of the “Belle Époque”.
The only thing I’m a little nostalgic about is the pre-internet world, which is almost like a Stone Age. It doesn’t make sense, the enormity of this upheaval, like electricity must have been for my ancestors.
No generation has had access to so much knowledge; his only problem is probably having to manage this abundance. But otherwise and despite everything, I find the present moment fascinating. Today, I know that nothing stops time and I want to take advantage of everything because it passes too quickly. I don’t feel like nostalgia anymore, even if I prepare myself psychologically for the comeback of the 2000s. I retained the Carpe Diem of Dead Poets Society (a great 1980s movie, by the way).
Who knows, 30 years from now, when teenagers say to their parents “it must have been great, the 2020s”, they will be told “yes, but there was the pandemic, the ecological crisis, the labor shortage work and housing…”. Maybe then they’ll rediscover 80’s by FouKi.