Nostalgie USA

Nostalgie USA does one thing and does it well: it treats American pop history as a living catalogue rather than a museum. Chuck Berry, The Temptations, Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen. Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding show up regularly, and the Motown selections dig past the obvious hits more often than you'd expect. The French framing is the interesting part. Hearing Springsteen introduced in French gives those songs a strange second life, and the presenters treat the material with reverence instead of irony. That matters. It's the difference between a station that loves this music and one t…