HOLLYWOOD BEYOND Whats The Colour of Money UK 7" 45

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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?. On another, more technical level, Rogers also has his reasons for mixing and matching producers from both sides of the Atlantic. And though Rogers admits that New England Digital's finest helped him get the basis of a song together, it seems that in the midst of the latest state-of-the-art technology, it was human beings who provided the vital musical spark. 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 think gigs generally now are very tired. I know there's a limited number of things you can do live, but you have to move on, there have to be new ideas to keep up with the way other things are going. I believe the longevity of a band is in its live appeal. If you can't cut it live, I'm not interested. People like U2 and Prince have the ability to translate their recorded work into live performance, and that's part of what makes them good. I've done things in the studio that I won't be able to do live, but the essence of what I put down I can still translate into a live performance." Hollywood Beyond, then. A pop band that care about their art, or a pop band with artistic pretentions?

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What’s The Colour Of Money? was released in 1986 and reached number seven in the UK single charts but follow-up No More Tears stalled at 47. Two further singles were released ( Save Me and After Midnight) but neither troubled the charts. And that was it! I have an album out at the moment – More More More, which is a collection of songs that I’ve done over 30 years. I also have three singles that I want to release. 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'. I wish I’d enjoyed the moment a little bit more. At the time it frustrated me that I was promoting songs that I had written three or four years [previous]. But I travelled the world doing my thing and got to work with some of the best producers at that time – people like Bernard Edwards and Mike Thorne.

You had a striking image at that point. Did you have people come up to you on the street singing the hit? Timing was a problem. The follow-up, No More Tears, missed the Top 40. Then the next single Save Me was due to come out the week after the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. Warners said it was inappropriate and shelved it. And the next record wasn’t ready for God knows how long. By that time things had changed – I had got into house music which wasn’t something that Warners understood. They wanted to extend my contract but I didn’t show up for the meeting. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t think I was going to be satisfied creatively.

I welcome constructive criticism but I've been in too many bands that couldn't make their minds up about things, or where people have said 'OK, I'll play it' without believing in it, which is even worse. If you ain't got a vibe for something, you shouldn't be playing it." In 2010, he founded, and along with Mike Thorne, is the director of BANG (Birmingham Arts Non-profit Group) Foundation which assists, though contemporary art, disadvantaged young people between 16-25 years in socially deprived areas in inner city Birmingham. 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." One of my most enjoyable moments around that time was when I was in living in Lancaster Gate in London. I got up in the morning early because I had to be at Warner Bros and there was the milkman there who I overheard singing What’s The Colour Of Money?. That was a real thrill for me. Neither the Eiffel Tower nor The Great Wave were produced with the intention of attaining globally emblematic status. Rather, emblematicity is a status acquired unpredictably and over time, a process that transpires through a complex interfacing of popular, administrative, and cultural actors (Lou Reference Lou2017:219). In the case of HOLLYWOOD, the sign was verging on falling down the mountain before its revitalization etched it rapidly into popular consciousness. At the time, the Hollywood film industry was already decades into its era of global dominance; the sign's valorization was in some ways merely a product of its adjacency to one of the world's largest cultural-industrial complexes, which delights in the occasional self-dedicated monument (e.g. La La Land, 2016). This extensive, only-sometimes-deliberate process of recognition involved myriad actors and economic forces before finally leading to the sign's metadiscursive uptake.

The HOLLYWOOD sign is probably the world's most famous language object. First erected as a real estate advertisement in 1923, over the course of the twentieth century the sign evolved into a metonym of the American film industry and, ultimately, a global emblem of glamor and high status itself. In tracing this history as a process of political-economic valorization, we describe how the features of this language object became enregistered. The size, emplacement, alignment, typeface, lexical content, and coloring of HOLLYWOOD each communicate the symbolic value represented by the sign, which remains a source of emanation that circulates across continents and contexts. From rural hillsides in Ireland to mountains outside Dubai, these enregistered features are invoked the world over through the bundling of features in language objects, advertisements, and art that cite HOLLYWOOD in bids for status or plays at irony. The diverse meanings and values created through such citations respond to the spatial, socioeconomic, and historical conditions of emplacement; as our two case studies demonstrate, citation follows idiosyncratic trajectories, responding to different affordances while subject to intensely ideological value judgements and debates. 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). 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. Figure 8. The HISINGEN sign printed on T-shirts for sale at a Hisingen market, on a tote bag in New York, tattooed on a woman's arm, and as huge letter objects being transported by helicopters (hotos from the HISINGEN sign's Facebook account). Footnote 10

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Hollywood Beyond achieved considerable chart success in a number of European territories as well as the UK. 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 has the lead singer of Hollywood Beyond been up to these past three decades? Will Simpson finds out… So what exactly was the colour of money? Well, according to the lyrics, it was not green nor gold, but red, why? “Because there’s always a bit of sweat and toil in it, almost like a little bit of blood,” Mark stated in Smash Hits in 1986. “That’s what you have to give before you get money. The song has no solutions and it has no ending, it’s just asking why – why do you have to give up so much to get something which has relatively no value but which is so necessary?”