2023-12-31 07:00:11
YIMENG SUN
“Every weekend, I went to a nightclub. Hip-hop, dancehall, disco… I loved everything”, lists Lisa, 24 years old, without nostalgia. A master’s student in artistic direction at the online school Studi, she remembers letting off steam on the dance floor up to four times a week. It was three years ago. “The Covid-19 epidemic taught me to like staying at home, so much so that my father, with whom I lived in Bordeaux in 2022, had the impression that I was not taking advantage of it enough”she summarizes, now living in Angers, with her mother, where she has returned to live for economic and professional reasons.
Lisa criticizes dance bars for what she loved there before: the noise and promiscuity. “Alcoholic people annoy me and I feel less safe than before”, admits the student, who devotes her evenings to dinners with friends or to the series she watches over and over: « Murder, Peaky Blinders et Desperate Housewives, which I watch three times a year. » With his alpaca blanket as his only partner. “There are friends with whom I have lost contact. Now I like to stay at home quietly, without having to make conversation. I’m often too lazy to go out. »
What if American pop and XXL dance floors were out of fashion? Le Bus Palladium, in Paris, The Vibes, in Laval, or L’Ephémère, in Clermont-Ferrand… All these nightclubs have closed their doors. Between the 1970s and today, more than half of these establishments have disappeared in France. Of course, young people continue to dance, but at home or on TikTok. THE rapport « U Going Out », published in 2022 on the British platform Keep Hush, drives home the point: millennials and generation Z appreciate clubbing culture less.
Risk-taking laziness
The journalist and essayist Vincent Cocquebert sees it as a “indoor generation”, who remains confined to her home. “In fact, when they say that they are too lazy to go out, it is more the laziness of the risk-taking that the party implies”estimates the author of The Cocoon Civilization (Arkhé, 2021). Risk taking in question? Going outside, surrounded by unfamiliar people. “There is a big domiciliation movement which also concerns the festive sector. We want a home, something customizable… We party less in outdoor places where we will rub shoulders with otherness”, he analyzes.
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This withdrawal into oneself would concern all social categories, in rural or urban areas. “The bourgeois circles have always celebrated among themselves. What is changing is that this phenomenon has affected the middle and lower classes. But they took advantage of these events to mix, indicates Jérémie Peltier, co-director general of the Jean Jaurès Foundation and author of The party is over ? (The Observatory, 2021), by referring to the work of the historian Sabine Melchior-Bonnet on solitude.
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