HOLLYWOOD BEYOND Whats The Colour of Money UK 7" 45

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Figure 11. a. Poster for an academic talk, Hong Kong, 2011; b. McDonald's advertisement with the Golden Arches emplaced in the cityscape, Hong Kong, 2007 (photos by Adam Jaworski). But don't get the idea that Rogers is either arrogant or egotistical. He sits relaxed in a record company office, happy to talk about himself and his music. I ask a question, he pauses to consider his answer. Suddenly I know I'm talking to a man who is the product of the continual frustrations of playing in pop bands, but with ideas and ambitions he still needs to realise. Cue Hollywood Beyond. On another, more technical level, Rogers also has his reasons for mixing and matching producers from both sides of the Atlantic. The most important thing is casting a record — you have to know what feel you want and what musicians have that feel. For example, I used Bruce Smith from PiL on 'What's the Colour of Money?', and the moment I heard his snare go down I knew he was right for it.

Figure 10. 3D adaptations of the HISINGEN sign in Gothenburg, from left to right: a styrofoam sign made by Jesper Hallén and friends for the Lindholmen Street Food Market (photo by Per Wahlberg, Göteborgs-Posten 14 April 2018); Café Fluß, a popular bar and music scene with an air of DIY urban cool (photo by Johan Järlehed, 25 April 2021). Two of Mark’s other claims to fame are that in 1987 he discovered soul singer Mica Paris and the following year became the first face on the Soul II Soul T-shirt.I have a UMI system at home which is great for working on my own. With a band you can say 'OK, eight bars of this then we'll switch to this', but with the UMI I can chop my arrangements around and listen to them instead of having to imagine them. That's a very useful thing for arrangements, but it's no good plugging it in to write on and expecting it to do something itself. The most important factor in creativity is the exchange of ideas. The strict term one-hit-wonder means that an artist had only one hit that made number one and then no other chart action whatsoever and there’s not too many of them, 65 in fact from Kitty Kallen in 1954 right up to Rachel Platten in 2015. I haven’t included any of the four number ones of 2016, which admittedly are all debut hits, but are likely to further their careers. But the sounds come as a secondary consideration to the songs. A sneak preview of If reveals a collection of refreshing pop songs where a classical cello may find itself alongside a koto and a collection of vocal samples, but only where the song demands it, not where it makes the kind of production sense that boosts record sales. The key lies in Rogers' approach to writing. As often as not, inspiration strikes when he's away from what he refers to as his 'tools'. Yes – I’ve got nothing against them but I’m living in 2019. As much as I appreciate my history I’ve always wanted to move forward. I’d rather do something that spans the whole of my career than just performing What’s The Colour Of Money?. The sign's indexicalization of physical place lasted until 1949, when the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce furnished repairs in exchange for the ‘LAND’ being dropped. Thus decontexualized, the HOLLYWOOD's mediatized appearance in art and cinema in the 1960s and 70s exhibited alteration of the sign's qualia (Gal Reference Gal and Coupland2016:123; cf. Peirce Reference Peirce1955), or its distinctive physical characteristics. In the film Earthquake (1974), it was eponymously destroyed in its hilltop emplacement, and when inducted into pop art with Edward Ruscha's Hollywood (1968), it was emplaced on the crest of the hillside, rather than nestled mid-slope, to stress the horizontality of the name and sign and their likeness to the landscape. With his piece, Ruscha further altered one of the most distinctive enregistered features of the sign, its misalignment. Footnote 4 In 1976 Danny Finegood made the first alteration to the sign itself, when, arguing that the sign was an environmental sculpture, he draped banners to spell ‘HOLLYWeeD’ in celebration of relaxed marijuana possession laws (Nelson Reference Nelson2007). Two years later, the sign was rebuilt following a high-profile fundraiser, with the new letters constructed in the same font and alignment as the original sign and affixed with concrete and steel girders to ensure lasting perpetuity (Braudy Reference Braudy2011:169).

Such citations are, of course, variously enabled and constrained by their emplacement (Scollon & Wong Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2003). Initially, Next Step Group did not apply for a building permit but simply erected NYA HOVÅS, arguing that ‘it's our land’ (interview with Next Step Group, December 2017). Next Step Group justified their position with the fact that the NYA HOVÅS sign had been placed upon, but not attached, to the ground and could therefore be used as a mobile place-maker, having indeed been relocated on three occasions between 2016–2022 (Järlehed et al. Reference Järlehed, Löfdahl, Milani, Nielsen;, Rosendal, Leibring, Mattfolk, Neumüller, Nyström and Pihl2021:82–83). Only in 2020, following pressure from the city planning office, did they apply for and receive a permit. Through the emplacement of the sign on the ground in the middle of the neighborhood, it serves as a daily claim of recognition of the ‘new’ name and place, and of legitimacy for the developers’ work and investments. What differentiates HOLLYWOOD from other global emblems is that it is a written word, a language object, and hence can be filled with varied lexical content. Although the prototypical HOLLYWOOD citation involves a place name like the source sign, not all do; other kinds of names and words are seen, such as Finegood's 1976 HOLLYWeeD and Johansson's 2006 JOHANSSON. Yet another dimension opens up when the citation includes a homonym with different meanings in different languages. The word hell is a (defamed) noun in English and a (famous) place name in Norwegian. The animators of the HELL sign near Trondheim in Norway consciously play with the semantic and grammatic ambiguity that is produced when this language object is lifted from the linguistic trapping of its national context and displayed and mediatized to international audiences where English dominates (Christenson Reference Christenson2021). While such atypical citations expand intertextual gaps, the authority of the sign (and its producer) is often preserved through discourses of creativity and/or transgression. Though the authority of Finegood's and Johansson's citations relies heavily on the artists’ own cultural capital (Jaworski Reference Jaworski, Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin2001; cf. Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1984), equally important is the HOLLYWOOD sign's symbolic value and the dominant frame of tourism and place branding (cf. Jaffe Reference Jaffe2016, quoted above). Taking on a variety of material forms, language objects are symbolic resources performing a sense of place, time, or person. Typically decorative or commemorative, language objects such as personal names on tattoos, jewelry, or written in the sand on the beach, can permanently or fleetingly manifest recognition, affection, or commitment to a person. As Järlehed ( Reference Järlehed2015:179–80) further shows in the context of Basque Country and Galicia, language objects’ materialization of emotion can support not just consumerism, but the actualization of nationalist pride. Others observe that language objects feature prominently in processes of urban gentrification, such as Gonçalves ( Reference Gonçalves2019:53) finds in the emplacement of Deborah Kass's YO/OY sculpture in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood, and Theng ( Reference Theng2021:6) notes in the predominance of neoliberal affect among the neon signage decorating upmarket cafes in Hong Kong and Singapore.This further suggests that we need to take into account the distinction between name and lexical item, or signified and signifier: the name Hollywood travels along with the HOLLYWOOD citations both when they present other place names (e.g. NYA HOVÅS), and when they do not include a place-designating lexeme (e.g. ÄLSKA LIVET; ‘Love Life’). As Munn shows, a person's fame is the ‘product of transactional processes’ ( Reference Munn1986:107) whereby the person's name travels ‘apart from his [sic] physical presence… through the minds and speech of others’ (1986:105). Similar processes are involved in the citation of HOLLYWOOD; the fame at the core of HOLLYWOOD's meaning potential travels through the name Hollywood, but also through the sign's enregistered features. Interestingly, when the materialization of the citation excludes the place-designating lexeme from the bundling, the name Hollywood is still part of the recontextualization process: it often materializes in spatiotemporal proximity to the citation, in co-texts such as metacommentary by the media and viewers of the sign by which the citation is characterized, as in ‘Hollywoodesque’ or (in Swedish) ‘Hollywood-skylten’. I won't say what it is because I hate it. It's not an SP12, because I've worked with that and I'd like to get one soon, and it's not a TR707 because I like that, too. I'm not very good with drum machines, so the display on the TR707 is great. When I'm writing, I don't pay too much attention to the start and end of the bars - I like to play with the tap facility and try to get into the feel of the rhythm I want. The trouble is that if the pattern doesn't fall into a proper bar in the machine, it can be difficult to isolate the bit I want. With the 707 I can read it from the display and reprogram it. I'm not a drummer and I don't pretend to understand a lot of rhythmic things from a drummer's point of view so, to me, that little screen is one of the most valuable parts of the machine.

You had a striking image at that point. Did you have people come up to you on the street singing the hit? Diffuse citation may aptly describe the circulation of a language object such as HOLLYWOOD, the features of which have become enregistered through political-economic valorization. Circulating globally, enregistered language features depart further and further from the source of emanation, as the contexts in which they are rebundled and rematerialized grow ever more various; rather than an endless procession of HOLLYWOOD signs and related language objects, we see the diffuse citation of a global linguistic-semiotic register that is consolidated through the repetition and uniformity of linguistic, visual, and design resources. In language objects, billboards, advertisements, art, and other texts-in-place, this register is applied broadly towards the accumulation of symbolic value—or parodies it, establishing ironic distance from the HOLLYWOOD sign. Yet as official sanction, institutional legitimacy, and social standing privilege citations enacted by prior holders of capital, this register is mitigated by the political-economic context in which it is manifested. I only have three regular people that I've used to date — the rest are a variety of people who were available at the time I needed them. Another thing I don't want is bread-heads. I don't want someone who will come in and do a job but keep looking at his watch. If you look towards creating something, then the money will follow. I never work with anyone unless I love them, and they have to feel the same way about me. I want something a little extra on top of my money's worth." Especially in this final example, the citation of HOLLYWOOD is sketchy at best; one might instead argue that McDonald's is simply orienting to the myriad electric billboards that crown Hong Kong's nighttime skyline. Even the tenuous invocation of enregistered emplacement, however, is not a coincidence but a form of ongoing entanglement—one in which indexicality breaks down into iconicity, as McDonald's the brand cites not the physical metonym of the American film industry, but rather a global ‘aesthetics of brandedness’ (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2016:81) that is collocated with that very metonym. Such citations, we argue, are diffuse: the citation of the source of emanation is not necessarily conscious nor explicit, yet through the select application of enregistered semiotic features, an interdiscursive relation with the symbolic value of a source event is nonetheless established. To put it otherwise, HOLLYWOOD ‘does not have to exist, to exist’. What I really like about UMI is the sound library - it means I can have a large selection of sounds available without having to have a huge amount of equipment. I drag things in, I steal their sounds, I put them on disk and that makes life a lot easier from a writing point of view. Different sounds evoke different emotions, so the bigger your library, the greater your choice of emotions."The sociohistorical enregisterment of bundled qualia predicates HOLLYWOOD's global circulation and appropriation, as the sign in Los Angeles continually ‘emanates’ as a source of semiotic and cultural value (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2013:346). HOLLYWOOD-esque signs appearing in disparate locations across Ecuador, Dubai, and Sweden are linked by a semiotic chain through which enregistered values are transmitted across spatiotemporal contexts in a process of ‘role alignment’ (Agha Reference Agha2006:203), as sign-making actors seek to establish association with schemas of cultural value through the citation of an enregistered semiotic repertoire. Yet more than simply reconstituting the HOLLYWOOD sign and its attendant value schema, actors orient to the sign's enregistered qualia to make new meanings. Following Nakassis ( Reference Nakassis2013:54), we suggest that HOLLYWOOD is ‘cited’ by ‘reflexively’ animating select enregistered features in new signs while marking these signs as ‘not (quite)’ the same. Such consciously interdiscursive citational acts are deliberately ‘entangled’ with the preceding discourse event, as actors distinguish their voices through deploying some form of ‘quotation marks’ around the cited event while other elements are ‘deformed’ (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2016:25; cf. Butler Reference Butler1993:175). Citational acts are at once playful and delicate, as actors tap into the social power of a discourse event yet risk being perceived as sycophants if they fail to adequately distinguish their own voice. While the cited event may be ‘real’, its exact imitation is ‘fake’; a properly-executed citation, however, succeeds in being understood both as genuine and something new altogether (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2016:61). What has the lead singer of Hollywood Beyond been up to these past three decades? Will Simpson finds out…

When you have an idea, all you need is the ability to get that idea over. I believe everybody who loves music must be able to create music. All you need is something like this thing I'm talking into now to hum your melody line into. There are enough people out there that can play it for you — it's the ideas that are the important thing. People tend to forget that. Figure 6. a. One of the first signs of the exploitation of Nya Hovås: a ritual act of possession, February 2017; b. The colored NYA HOVÅS sign in August 2021 (photos by Johan Järlehed). The ideas tend to come when I go walking or something. I like making rhythms with my feet and things like that.As a language object and symbolic resource, HOLLYWOOD has become ‘emblematically’ (Agha Reference Agha2006:235) associated with a set of values that facilitate its diffusion and spread into new contexts, domains, and genres. It is one of many global emblems, Footnote 3 examples of which are, among others, derived from art (e.g. the Mona Lisa), architecture (e.g. the Great Wall), and music (e.g. Vivaldi's Spring), all providing fodder for a bewildering array of interpretations, reproductions, and adaptations. Writing about perhaps the most renowned of global emblems, the Eiffel Tower, Barthes ( Reference Barthes2012:131) observes that ‘the Tower is everything man [sic] puts into it… an inimitable object that is endlessly reproduced, it is a pure sign’. At turns lauded and despised by artists, poets, and cultural critics, the Tower assumed the role of ‘modernist visual icon’ (Conley Reference Conley2010:765; also see Insausti Reference Insausti, Homem and de Fátima Lambert2006) before evolving into ‘the Esperanto of tourism’ (Freeman Reference Freeman2016:118). Whether it is interpreted as a symbol of romance or a hallmark of sophisticated cultural cachet, likenesses of the Eiffel Tower are ubiquitous motifs, adorning t-shirts, accessories, advertisements, and handheld figurines, alongside nearly to-scale monuments in cities such as Macau, Hangzhou, and Las Vegas. The proliferation of such landmarks and souvenirs are indicative of an emblem's diffuse interpretations; as Löfgren ( Reference Löfgren1999:88) writes, ‘There might be millions of tiny brass Eiffel Towers distributed over the globe, but no two of them carry the same meanings’. Hollywood Beyond achieved considerable chart success in a number of European territories as well as the UK. WITH A LIST of credits looking like a 'Who's Who' of modern producers, it's taken as read that high technology has played its part in the proceedings. Rogers is adamant that, like the musicians and producers who have helped him, equipment is also there merely to fulfil his requirements.