HOLLYWOOD BEYOND Whats The Colour of Money UK 7" 45

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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." 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’. I want to do anything that's danceable and interesting, anything as long as it's not bland. Yes, I want hits, but I want them to be good enough songs to be singles, rather than songs that should be in the charts because they've been released as singles. I can't sit down and write a single. Having written a song I can say that's possibly a single, but I can't write overt pop music. It's a formula that would be very easy to follow, but I'd like to find my own formula. Music itself is endless, so there must be things we haven't dealt with in pop yet. At the moment I think we desperately need a new movement. England is a very small, if prestigious, market - perhaps it's time for people to start thinking global... 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).

Companies, etc.

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’. Unfortunately, you need to have successful singles so that people know you're out there and will buy your album. We were discussing all the bands during the '70s that never used to sell many singles but had huge album sales. I can't think of how people got to know about them. I think it was because there was a much bigger gig circuit then." 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). Depleted though the current live circuit may be, Hollywood Beyond intend taking full advantage of it, with an imminent tour and an aggressive use of visuals that will accompany it. 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.

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. When is the HOLLYWOOD sign? Deconstructing the bundling and hierarchization of enregistered features The sign did, however, begin with an outsized splash. Conceived as a billboard advertisement for a 1923 real estate development called ‘Hollywoodland’, the sign's letters—even larger than today's, costing the equivalent of a quarter-million US dollars—were lit by 4,000 twenty-watt bulbs, which in four separate bursts flashed ‘HOLLY’ – ‘WOOD’ – ‘LAND’ – ‘HOLLYWOODLAND’. Yet the first indication of the sign's future enregisterment came not with the billboard's cinematic grandiosity, but with the 1932 suicide of the actor Peg Entwistle, who allegedly jumped from the top of the ‘H’ to her death. The suicide and its subsequent reportage marked an initial, if grim, ‘symbolic’ perception of the sign (Braudy Reference Braudy2011:96) and the inaugural event in a ‘semiotic chain’ (Agha Reference Agha2006:205) of linked events through which the sign's enregistered meaning continues to circulate today ( Figure 5b). The suicide availed the sign's potential for mediatization (Agha Reference Agha2011) as a news spectacle of Hollywood-worthy drama, and—with morbid fascination trained on the ‘H’—drew attention to the sign's materiality as a potential semiotic repertoire.

Artist Appearances

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. 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. I'm not a dictator", he says, "but I've done time in bands and it's not for me. If you believe in what you do, people call you arrogant. But if you don't, then nobody else is going to either. I think the reason bands form is because they have secrets to keep. I've got my secrets but I'd like to share them with lots of other people.

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." 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.

Behind Hollywood Beyond

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. I left Pyramid because I wanted to step up my game. I left with Jamie Rose, my manager, and one time we were having breakfast deciding what we were going to do and I was reading the Kenneth Anger book Hollywood Babylon, which is how I came up with the name. The ideas tend to come when I go walking or something. I like making rhythms with my feet and things like that. 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."

You had a striking image at that point. Did you have people come up to you on the street singing the hit? 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'. Nya Hovås ‘New Hovås’ is the unofficial name of a new neighborhood that, in 2014, began construction 12km south of the Gothenburg city center. According to city authorities the formerly unexploited rural land is called Brottkärr or Brottkärrsmotet ‘Brottkärr junction’, yet developer Next Step Group did not find this designation marketable and contracted an agency, Löfgren Branding, to create a new name. The agency came up with Nya Hovås, intertextually referencing the sense of luxury associated with the well-known and prestigious Hovås neighborhood some 3km north of Nya Hovås (interview with Löfgren Branding, October 2017). The developer's choice, however, has not been officially approved and adopted by Gothenburg's Naming Committee (Järlehed, Löfdahl, Milani, Nielsen, & Rosendal 2021). Although the name Nya Hovås is widely recognized and used by the general public, it has yet to feature on any city signage. 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. It's actually three people", he reveals, "There's myself, Jamie B Rose and Cliff Whyte. Cliff's an engineer who does our live work, Jamie does a lot of lyric writing with me and also helps visualising things. We're all from Birmingham and we put Hollywood Beyond together as an umbrella under which we can fulfil our ideas."What has the lead singer of Hollywood Beyond been up to these past three decades? Will Simpson finds out… 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 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. 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).