Since I started working on my piece, I feel that the themes I want to address have changed somewhat and now is a good time to reflect on and address this.

In my blog post reviewing Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger, I mentioned how I wanted to cover themes such as the darker side of fame and mistruths that are spread by tabloid magazines about celebrities and their personal lives. I am still interested in these themes, but I feel as though the direction my piece started taking when it actually came to making it has been slightly different and it might be time to have more of a think about what I actually want to say.

I think this is partly as a result of me feeling a little stuck when thinking of ways to sonify the themes I originally wanted to cover. This led to me just trying to start with making the piece, even if I didn’t 100% know where I was going with it. This was a good way of getting my process moving, but I feel it’s produced something that’s quite different to what I may have originally envisaged.

The layering of the samples I have gathered so far into my piece seem to create a sense of overwhelm, which when combined with the low, rumbling soundscape come together to make a dread-ish mood. I like this, even though it’s not what I originally intended. I recently read an article by climate and political activist George Monbiot in The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/20/celebrity-corporate-machine-fame-big-business-donald-trump-kim-kardashian) that resonated with a lot of the feelings I had about celebrity gossip culture when I was searching for samples to use in my piece. In the article, Monbiot describes how celebrity culture is “an essential component of the systems that govern our lives” and mentions interesting correlations between people that follow celebrity gossip and political engagement – he mentions an International Journey of Consumer Studies report that “reveals that people who are most interested in celebrity are the least engaged in politics, the least likely to protest and the least likely to vote”. This then paints tabloid journalism as potentially a way of pacifying swathes of the population into inaction over issues with large impact such as climate change, the wars occurring in Europe and the Middle East at the moment and the future of artificial intelligence, amongst many others. One could argue that this is verging on conspiracy theory territory, however Monbiot presents an argument that is backed up with studies that confirm his hypothesis. As a species, we are currently living in one of the most potentially dangerous and volatile periods in our history as of yet, and remaining politically informed and engaged is becoming ever more important. This article was written around the same time that Donald Trump became the U.S. President, and Monbiot explains how “his celebrity became a mask for his own chaotic, outsourced and unscrupulous business empire” and how this helped him in his campaign for the presidency. I think this is true, and certainly I believe that one of the main reasons for Trump’s rise was the platform given to him by news outlets who pushed him as a wild, zany outsider to the traditional U.S. political system. Making a piece that highlights this idea of celebrity gossip culture being a mask for covering much more sinister and important topics is a theme that I believe will lend itself to storytelling through sound, and also allows me to explore a world of political engagement through sound art that I haven’t much previously explored.

Having further thought about the development of my piece, I think I will try to incorporate more violent sounds associated with current pressing political issues such as military helicopters and oil rigs as the piece goes on, with the samples of news reports eventually being drowned out by these sounds to highlight the meaninglessness of gossip culture. I would like to question the media we consume as a population and the agendas behind it. This is something I feel I can develop from the piece I have made so far and I feel inspired to continue developing it.