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Saturday 24 March 2012

The decline of Western fast food

Closed for business - Holborn BK
Some of the world's most recognisable brands are junk, but the value of their brash, bright franchises are going into decline.

The last time I went to Burger King was about six months ago, outside Gloucester Road tube station. I was a little drunk and had a double whopper with bacon and cheese, and onion rings and a coke. I felt somewhat guilty and a little exhilarated and probably a bit self-righteous because I was talking about diets.

That same Burger King ran a marketing gimmick a few years ago where you could order a £95 whopper that was made from rare beef and topped with truffles - an attempt to garner publicity with it's non-core target market of young, working class men. It was dismissed in the media as a poorly conceived marketing stunt masquerading as corporate social responsibility (proceeds were donated to charity).

In the early 2000s, BK, in a bid to differentiate itself from its closest competitor McDonalds after being bought out by a tri-mera of private equity firms including Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, deliberately pumped its burgers full of trans fats, made them bigger and declared war on the calorie-conscious and weak-wristed. It was a foolhardy strategy that failed, and the 2007-08 financial crisis took a further toll on BK as its target market was hit hardest and cut back on whoppers.


A roaring trade - Holborn McDonalds
I wasn't surprised, then, to see that the filthy little BK kiosk across the road from Holborn tube station had closed, an ignoble end to an outlet in a tarnished chain. Opposite Holborn tube in the other direction, a gleaming green McDonalds continues to do a thriving business, that outlet an example of how the world's most ubiquitous burger chain has successfully rebranded and altered its business model to become more palatable to a consumer base well-versed in trans fats and the obesity epidemic.


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Not a very nice lady
If you grew up in the 80s, there's a good chance that you have something of a love/hate relationship with fast food brands. Brand advertising took off in the 80s, and the world's biggest consumer companies binged on sticking their logos on anything that might appeal to their target markets. Read any of the classic brand texts from the 80s and you find that all roads lead back to fast food - these companies understood the power of brand earlier than every other industry, and pretty much spoon fed academic authors the nuggets of wisdom they published. Like cigarette companies, they saw a further opportunity to make lifelong customers out of a generation of young consumers. There's a whole industry devoted to the psychology of marketing to children and there's written proof of the lasting power of branding, especially when it's aimed at children, as publisher of Shoreditch Twat fanzine Neil Boorman's Bonfire of the Brands attests.

I, Smokey, I mean Dopey, swear that nicotine is not addictive
The tobacco industry's PR house of cards came down in the 90s, when health groups and consumer watchdogs, amongst others, started to garner support for their battles against the industry. The 'seven dwarves' incident, when the seven CEOs of the seven biggest American tobacco companies committed perjury by swearing that their products weren't addictive, was self-admission, by default, that they were the corporate bogeymen of an unethical industry.

Warren Buffett's changing attitude towards the investability of tobacco companies is a stark mirror on the social acceptability of tobacco:

'I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It's addictive. And there's fantastic brand loyalty.' (1987)

'Investments in tobacco are fraught with questions that relate to societal attitudes and...I would not like to have a significant percentage of my net worth invested in tobacco businesses.' (1994)


But fast food escaped. When I was a kid, a big family day out in West Germany was a trip to the American PX, an hour's drive north to Bremen. It was the equivalent of a trip to the shopping mall, where some of the exotica we could expect to find were hip hop records, Nike Air Jordans and weird toys, topped off with lunch at Burger King. For many people, McDonalds is the ultimate symbol of American consumer culture; but McDonalds was everywhere, even in suburban West Germany, where it compromised on it's golden arches and then-corporate colours of yellow on red so that the conservative town council would allow an outlet to open in picturesque central Celle (there were brown arches on white). For me, Burger King, available only on special occasions at the American barracks, was THE American burger.

A Food Fighter
Back then, middle class parents still took their kids to fast food restaurants without needing to be nagged too much, and mine were no different. In fact, I think my dad even quite liked BK. Merchandising was key to the close affinity that fast food brands struck up with children, and indeed toys are a great marker of just how acceptable marketing fast food to kids was. One of the weird and wonderful toy lines that I used to be fascinated by at the American PX was 'Food Fighters'. They were grotesque pieces of fast food dressed in military gear and brandishing weapons, part of either the Kitchen Commandoes (the goodies) or the Refrigerator Rejects (the baddies). They had names like Burgerdier General, Private Pizza and Chip the Ripper. I thought they were amazing. My parents, happy to let us stuff our faces with junk food once in awhile, thought that the army theme was a step too far and refused to buy them for us.

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For much of the 90s, the narrative about the evils of junk food was confined to marginal publications like the Socialist Worker, handed out on street corners to curious teenagers (like me). I'm not sure exactly when the zeitgeist turned against fast food once and for all, but the milestones that stand out to me are Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me. Who could forget how shocking it was when Morgan Spurlock was told by his doctor that he risked long term liver damage after a month long McDonalds-only diet? Certainly not the McDonalds corporate board, who announced that they would no longer continue to offer the super size option. There the seeds of its business transformation were sown. Today, McDonalds is lauded for its commitment to sustainability and doing its bit, strange as it may seem, to combat obesity.

Burger King, safe behind the golden arches taking a battering on behalf of an entire industry, carried on doing what they do, seemingly oblivious to the changing tide of public opinion. The little Jacksonville, Florida burger chain has changed hands multiple times, each time being sold on because it couldn't provide the return to its new owners that they expected. The closure of the Holborn outlet, strategically positioned by the busstop so drunken office workers could grab a whopper for the bus ride home, is just a tiny chapter in its slow decline.

Sunday 4 March 2012

Axl Rose has a mental Molotov cocktail with a match to go

Keith Lemon does Axl Rose
We all live vicariously through the past and future, via timeless songs and 'perfect' celebrity relationships. Whenever tragedy strikes the performers of those timeless songs, or real life cracks the facade of the perfect romance, we get nostalgic. Lots of publicly uttered platitudes about Whitney Houston (although this blog post captured her legacy quite neatly and sweetly). Kitchen sink confessions here about the end of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore's model bohemian marriage. But mostly just a lot of fun poked at Axl Rose for getting fat and making a fool of himself.

A pervert in the public toilets
Axl has done a lot over the past 20 years to make himself a source of ridicule, mostly by doing nothing for so long about what was eventually released as the underwhelming Chinese Democracy album. If you've read anything about the colourful history of Guns n Roses, you'll know that his bandmates, management and groupies found him 'scary'. This was part of his huge appeal; GnR seemed genuinely dangerous. It was news to me, but bipolar disorder is a fairly new medical concept, and so while Axl was diagnosed as manic depressive no one really knew why he was so crazy. And now we know, we chortle.

Anyone who's ever listened to a GnR album will know that Axl has a novel way with words. After all, his nom de plume is an anagram of 'oral sex'. Ever since I was very young, when I would furtively read the CD inlay card lyrics for Appetite for Destruction in the British Army NAAFI in central Germany, I've been a little frightened and enthralled by GnR because of Axl's lyrics. When my brother and I pooled our savings as teenagers and bought Use Your Illusion II on cassette, we used to keep it locked away in a box and only listen to it on our walkmen in case our parents overheard it, caught wind of what was going on, and took it away from us.

It's been a long time since I listened to them, but the fascination's always remained, lying dormant over the years. Then, this Christmas, I bought Take Me Home - The Bluegrass Tribute To Guns N Roses, and Use Your Illusions I and II. Revisiting them as a 30 something I gained a new perspective. Where Appetite is tightly wound and compelling, UYI I & II are long and tedious. Izzy Stradlin contributes a few middle-of-the-road Rolling Stones rip-offs that provide some respite from the insanity. And that insanity, which makes up the majority of UYIs combined 30 songs, ricochets between ballads from the psychiatrist's couch and stock rock from inside the padded cell of Axl's mind.

His most controversial lyric is the 'immigrants and faggots' line from 'One In A Million'. Compared to the content of the UYIs, that was just mundanely offensive. Start at the end, with 'My World', which closes UYI II:

You don't understand your sex
You ain't been mindfucked yet

Back track through Bad Obsession:

I call my mother
She's just a cunt now
She said I'm sick in the head

(it's often said that mother knows best).

And onto the one-two Tourettes sucker-punch of 'Shotgun Blues' and 'Get In The Ring':

I'll stick it right in your face
And then I'll put you in your motherfuckin place
And you can suck my ass...
Ooooh, you want a confrontation?
(Shotgun Blues)

And while you're talkin about a vasectomy
I'll be writing down your obituary...
I'd like to crush your head tight in my vice
Pain!!!
(Get In The Ring)

Finish with 'Breakdown', where Axl quotes at length Cleavon Little's character Super Soul in the film Vanishing Point. Taken out of context, it's wonderfully deranged:
There goes the challenger being chased by the blue blue meanies on wheels
The vicious traffic squad cars are after our lone driver
The last American hero
The-the electric sintar
The demi-God, the super driver of the Golden West!
Two nasty Nazi cars are close behind the beautiful lone driver
The police cars are getting closer-closer...
Closer to our soul hero in his soul mobile, yeah baby!
They about to strike, they gonna get him, smash! rape!
The last beautiful free soul on this planet
But... it is written if the evil spirit arms the tiger with claws
Brahman provided wings for the dove
Thus spake the super guru

Read Stephen Davis' Watch You Bleed, 'deranged' is pretty much the impression you get. The context is also striking; LA, or more specifically Sunset Strip, in the 80s was like the Wild West - lawless, reckless, and hazardous. Like Southern California itself, the 'hair metal' Sunset Strip bands all dreamt of becoming infinite, and did their very best to test that invincibility with all manner of risk-taking, usually involving sex, drugs, and, er, dangerous weapons. Amidst all this, Axl went from being a 'shy, humble guy who was a lot of fun to be with' according to Vince Neil, to an erratic hermit with a messiah complex, in the space of five years.

He's been called one of the greatest singers of all time by NME and Rolling Stone, and lamented as a genius with a serious mental illness. He also named a song on Chinese Democracy 'There Was A Time', which is fondly referred to as TWAT by die-hards, who've kept up with the Buckethead-era GnR. Nostalgia's funny like that.