Michelle Phillipov

Haunted by the Spirit of '77: Punk Studies and the Persistence of Politics

The contemporary punk scene(s) are today comprised of an enormous spectrum of musical, subcultural, institutional and political practices, many of them only tangentially linked to one another by historical and geographical antecedents. Yet despite some attempts to acknowledge and explore this musical and subcultural diversity, academic accounts of the movement have remained largely unchanged since the advent of punk scholarship in the late 1970s. While frequently structured as a rejection of earlier approaches, punk scholars since the 1980s have continued to reiterate many of the same assumptions which characterized the initial work in the field: assumptions about resistance, subversion and political radicalism. Punk, remarks Roger Sabin (1999, p. 2) in a recent anthology on the movement, is a ‘notoriously amorphous concept’ to define. Acknowledging the unresolvedness of certain debates about punk—whether it originated in the United Kingdom or the United States, for example, or whether it ‘died’ in 1979 or continues to live on in a variety of current musical trajectories—he ultimately settles on the following working definition:

In defense of textual analysis: Resisting methodological hegemony in media and cultural studies

Media and cultural studies are currently experiencing a renewed and intensified engagement with sociology and sociological methods, with studies of popular music especially affected by attempts to make media and cultural research “more sociological.” This paper explores recent methodological debates in media and cultural studies by critiquing the “ethnographic turn” in popular music studies, as well as the growing antipathy toward textual analysis methods. It argues that while sociological popular music studies may rhetorically privilege “real” experience over abstract textualism, its methods are often limited to the dimensions of experience that can be readily observed and verbalized, or resort to the kind of abstract theorizing its practitioners claim to reject. Using examples from heavy and extreme metal music, this paper argues that while all research methods are inevitably partial, textual analysis can offer creative ways to articulate experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible to empirical research methods, and that the use of text-based approaches can improve, rather than weaken, our understanding of popular media and culture.

Mastering obesity: MasterChef Australia and the resistance to public health nutrition

At the same time as overweight and obesity have come to dominate population health priorities in most western countries, food programming takes up more time on western television screens than ever before. This has resulted both in increased televisual representations of so-called ‘unhealthy’ foods (such as butter, cream and fatty red meats), and in greater public health scrutiny of the preparation and consumption of such foods. This article explores this paradox via a case study of MasterChef Australia, the most successful iteration of the popular MasterChef franchise. At a time when the ‘obesity epidemic’ has been a particular focus of Australian public health promotion, MasterChef Australia revels in the apparently ‘excessive’ use of saturated fats, especially butter, a food routinely declared by Australian health advocacy bodies as one to be avoided. This article argues that MasterChef Australia offers an alternative to puritanical nutrition discourses – not, on the whole, by explicitly contesting them, but by presenting food in ways that such discourses are largely irrelevant. The public health concerns generated by this use of butter on MasterChef Australia offer important insight into current debates about food and health, and, in particular, into the limitations of current public health communication strategies.

Escaping to the country: media, nostalgia, and the new food industries

ABSTRACT Over the past decade in the West, television cooking shows have popularized interest in the provenance of food against a backdrop of public concern about the practices of industrial food production. This article explores two series that offer self-sufficiency as a solution to the problem of industrial agriculture. Escape to River Cottage and Gourmet Farmer each centre on a narrative of a city-dweller moving to the country to set up a smallholding. With their nostalgia for an earlier—simultaneously unproblematic and emotionally fulfilling—time of food production, these series imagine a Utopian lifestyle in which audiences are encouraged to choose to produce and consume differently. That it is (middle-class) men who are rediscovering traditional food practices highlights how media discourses surrounding food production can become entangled in gendered representations that give rise to niche food products and experiences designed to ameliorate feelings of risk and uncertainty in contemporary food systems.

The new politics of food: Television and the media/food industries

The provenance of food and the ethics of food production and consumption are increasingly a focus of media, particularly of television cooking shows. This is the result of complex dynamics of interaction between the media and food industries that are influencing consumer behaviours and business practices. This article offers a preliminary exploration of some of these relationships, focusing on Australian food television. Using two case studies that are arguably at opposite ends of the media/food spectrum – the first focusing on a niche lifestyle programme that advocates for small food producers and the second focusing on the televisual marketing strategies of a major supermarket – the article considers how relationships between media and food industries are not only investing food with new meaning and significance but are also opening up new markets and marketing strategies for food products and experiences.

Communicating health risks via the media: what can we learn from MasterChef Australia?

Understanding the viewer impact of the prime time television cooking show, MasterChef Australia , may help us to communicate more positively received messages about food and eating.

‘Generic Misery Music’? Emo and the Problem of Contemporary Youth Culture

This article examines the Australian newspaper coverage of the Emo youth cultural movement in relation to two incidents that contributed to its growing inclusion in mainstream media discourse: the February 2007 murder of 15-year-old Carly Ryan and the April 2007 suicides of 16-year-old friends Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier. The deaths of the three young women were frequently linked to their apparent involvement in the Emo movement, which was described as a dangerous and worrying development in youth culture. However, specific concerns about Emo were frequently subsumed into broader anxieties about young people more generally, particularly in relation to concerns associated with self-harm, unsupervised internet use and school bullying. The disinclination among participants of this movements to identify as Emo or to challenge the medias framing of Emo culture has contributed much to the medias redefinition of Emo as a characteristic of ‘kids today’ rather than a specific subcultural affiliation.

Using media to promote artisan food and beverages: insights from the television industry

Purpose – The increasing frequency with which food and beverage producers feature in mainstream media, including television cooking shows, provide opportunities and pitfalls for using media to promote artisan food and beverage businesses. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate these, as experienced by a group of food and beverage producers who appeared on the popular Australian television show, Gourmet Farmer. Design/methodology/approach – Findings are based on semi-structured interviews with 14 of the producers featured on the show, plus textual analysis of relevant segments of the show. Findings – While all of the producers felt that food television offered a good promotional tool, those who were most familiar with the practices of media production and whose businesses offered experiences through which viewers could access (or imagine) a “taste” of the Gourmet Farmer life tended to be more satisfied than those who were less familiar with the practices of media production and who expected a greater foc...

A pinch of ethics and a soupçon of home cooking: Soft-selling supermarkets on food television

On 27 August 2013, Australian commercial broadcaster Network Ten screened a new reality show, Recipe to Riches, in a primetime slot. Based on a Canadian format of the same name, the show sees contestants — ordinary people with no formal training or food credentials — competing for the prize of having their homemade recipes recognised as worthy of being top-selling supermarket products. This chapter discusses the Australian version of this somewhat unusual reality show, situating the rise of the format in the broader contexts of the increasing politicisation and scrutiny of food production and provenance as well as the role of agribusiness and supermarket players in Australia and internationally. Reality-based food shows like MasterChef Australia (Network Ten 2009-) have proved to be highly successful commercial ventures, integrating ‘below-the-line’ advertising and commodities seamlessly into their format structure and content. Sponsored by major Australian supermarket chain, Woolworths, Recipe to Riches takes this commercial logic considerably further. Turning the recipes of ordinary Australians into mass products through a large-scale ‘batch up’ process in a (purportedly) commercial kitchen, the show’s narrative involves developing a branding strategy and a product launch, finally resulting in its temporary placement on Woolworth’s shelves, at which point viewers get to vote for their favourite product by buying it in-store or online.

The celebrification of farmers: celebrity and the new politics of farming

‘Farmers are the real rock stars’, says American celebrity chef Mario Batali (2014, p. 9) in the opening line of his 10th and most recent cookbook, America Farm to Table: Simple, Delicious Recipes Celebrating Local Farmers. For Batali (2014, p. 10), the popular influence of the ‘celebrity chef’ should be replaced by that of the ‘celebrity farmer’, a figure with much greater potential to change not only how we cook at home, but also the food system as a whole. A few months after Batali’s book was published, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture Karen Barrett Ross was reported saying it is her ‘dream to make farmers [like] rock stars’, as has happened with wine makers and celebrity chefs (Potter 2015). These comparisons of farmers with rock stars highlight significant changes to the public profile of farmers and farming in recent years. While over the past few decades farmers have enjoyed less cultural prominence than other food industry figures in the Global North – notably, celebrity chefs and food personalities like Michael Pollan – they are now undergoing similar processes of celebrification. We see this in the emergence of internationally recognised farmers like Joel Salatin and José Bové as the public faces of opposition to industrial food production – Salatin through his defiant eco-local livestock production and Bové through his fierce anti-corporate food activism. We can also see it in more ‘everyday’ practices, such as the rise of farmers’ markets, which are enjoying growth in part due to opportunities they offer consumers to meet and ‘connect’ with food producers (Kirwan 2004). Farmers’ names are increasingly appearing on restaurant menus of produce-driven eateries or on name-branded products like those of UK farmerturned-politician Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, whose Black Farmer label is sold by major supermarkets. Small retailers and major supermarkets alike are placing farmers centre stage through in-store, ‘integrated’ and traditional advertising campaigns (Johnston et al. 2009, Phillipov 2016b). Cookbooks featuring stories of farmers and their produce are now commonplace. Primetime television cooking shows – from the numerous Hairy Bikers series (UK) to Gourmet Farmer (Australia) to Farmhouse Rules (USA) – regularly include visits to farmers to collect ingredients and showcase their stories and production practices. The increasing prominence of farmers in media and popular culture can be seen in part as a reflection of the growth of alternative and sustainable food practices (Goodman et al.