What's With Food in Music Videos? Beyoncé, Gwen Stefani and Taylor Swift Are Obsessed

Photo: Beyonce.com

It’s hard to ignore the navy sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “kale” that Beyoncé sports in the first moments of her new music video for the track “7/11.” Or the pizza emojis that plaster Gwen Stefani’s latest, “Spark the Fire.” Even noted skinny caramel latte aficionado Taylor Swift is stabbing a heart-shaped cake in her recent ode to tortured romance, “Blank Space.”

So what’s going on? Why is food suddenly popping up in music videos?

It’s not an entirely novel phenomenon, explains Yahoo Music editor Lyndsey Parker. “Food in music videos isn’t new… it seemed in the ’80s, there were a lot of videos at banquet tables,” she explained. Take, for instance, the iconoclastic dining room scenes in the video for metal band Ratt’s 1984 single, “Round And Round.” The band members have set up shop in a wealthy family’s attic, burst through the ceiling in a blaze of dust and plaster, and proceed to rock out atop the family’s formal table.

Beyoncé also sports a “Cake by the Pound” shirt in “7/11.” Photo: YouTube.com

Then there are the raucous meals in the videos for 1981 hit “Working Girl" (by British punk band The Members) and 1982’s "The One Thing,” by the inimitable INXS.In the ’90s and ’00s, rowdy meals made cameos in videos for “Twice as Hard" (The Black Crowes) and “Curse of Curves,” by pop punk group Cute is What We Aim For.

Food, it seems, has long served a symbolic role in pop and rock videos. In This is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project, Mountain Goats singer John Darnielle writes that Ratt’s trashing of the dining room table in “Round and Round” is a “gesture meant to indicate the displacement of the old order by a newer and more powerful generation.” Formal banquet scenes from that era were intended as a jarring juxtaposition to the let-loose attitudes of young punks.

For Gwen Stefani, pizza emojis are business as usual. Photo: YouTube.com

As for grub in today’s music videos? Maybe trendy kale and pizza emojis serve as emblems of cool for Beyoncé and Gwen Stefani. So far, they seem to be working.

And Taylor Swift’s defiled heart cake, interspersed with images of a love affair gone wrong? Well, maybe that one’s self-explanatory.

More stories about the food-musician connection:
Hip Hop Hooch: Musician Spirits, Rated
DIY Skinny Caramel Latte for Taylor Swift
The Best Foods for Singers

Know of other notable food moments in music videos? Tell us below!