Once a month in Paris, during the Chronologic evenings held at the Machine du Moulin Rouge club, it is possible to go back in time. The concept? Like Marty McFly in Back to the futureyou are invited to shake your hips on “The best dance hits of every decade”from the 1950s to the 2010s, to experience – in the words of the organizers – a “timeless jetlag”. “This evening has had the same success for twelve years, it is always sold out two weeks in advance”assures Anaïs Condado, programmer at the Machine du Moulin Rouge at the time of the interview. At each Chronologic, the waiting list is 1,500 people, a record for the venue. “There is an aspect of communion on the dance floor, we share with strangers music that we all know. A kind of collective unconscious is established.” Presented as “the evening where the Beatles twist with Beyoncé”Chronologic lets you slide through eras as easily as scrolling through Instagram.
In the same club, other trendy, more specific evenings also aim to offer you a step back from the greyness of the present, in order to forget the wars, climate change and the collapse of ecosystems: the We Are The 90’s and its little sister, the Bug of the year 2000. On the dance floor, nostalgic thirty- and forty-somethings rub shoulders, but not only. There are also many young people there, who did not directly experience the excitement of those years. Anne-Sophie and Solène (they did not wish to give their names), 22 years old, born in 2002, sip a drink at the bar. “We’re more 2000s. There’s an extra level of madness!”, says Solène, dressed in a panther-patterned outfit and cowboy boots. For the two friends, this sonic therapy is, first and foremost, a way to escape from their daily lives, as if carefree living were no longer possible today and that we had to look for its seeds in other times.
Has the past become a new means of reassurance? Are younger generations taking refuge in “comfortable eras” to better forget the multiple crises that saturate their horizon? For the psychoanalyst Michael Stora, this is a “avoidance strategy in the face of a very anxiety-provoking society”. It is clear that in France a strong feeling of downgrading is running through public opinion. According to a 2023 Ipsos-Sopra Steria study, 70% of under-35s believe that “It was better before”. So we inject ourselves with doses of the past. On TikTok, the archives of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) have more than 500,000 subscribers. Since it made a programmatic shift towards the 1980s, Nostalgie has become the second music radio station in France, attracting a large young audience.
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