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. The ideas tend to come when I go walking or something. I like making rhythms with my feet and things like that. 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'. However, according to the animators of the HISINGEN sign (Antonsson & Hallén Reference Antonsson and Hallén2014), the high-rise Karlatornet is just another example of generic star architecture that could be built anywhere in the world. The HISINGEN sign, they argue, would ‘anchor the building in the place’. Even as HOLLYWOOD's global emblematicity might be seen to foster genericism, the lexical and semantic content of HISINGEN evidently charges the sign with a sense of place that is deeply embedded in local imaginaries. This can be seen in a feasibility study by the Municipal Board (Park och Naturförvaltningen Reference Park och Naturförvaltningen2016:3), which, negotiating the intended citational act and reflecting on its interdiscursivity, considered whether the sign might spell the city's name, ‘Göteborg’, rather than ‘Hisingen’. As HISINGEN could be perceived as ‘exclusionary’ and ‘not part of Gothenburg’, the Board maintained, erecting GÖTEBORG instead would be ‘inclusive’ and demonstrate ‘that even Hisingen is a part of Gothenburg’. Finally, the Board argued that GÖTEBORG could be part of the city's 400th centenary in 2021, and one of the economic and branding vehicles for the city. Designer Jesper Hallén disagreed, contending that GÖTEBORG would not be as ‘humorous and beautiful’ as HISINGEN. To him, the contrast between the fame of Hollywood and the rather rough image associated with Hisingen is key to the successful citation. Additionally, like Ruscha, Hallén noted the spatial qualities of the name—its ‘horizontalness’ (Braudy Reference Braudy2011:164), that is, its horizontal physical extension—and the visual similarity between HOLLYWOOD and HISINGEN, as opposed to HOLLYWOOD and GÖTEBORG.

Another reason I wanted to keep changing producers was to avoid settling into their routines. I don't want anyone else putting their stamp on my music — I'll put my own stamp on it." 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. Hollywood Beyond‘s time in the spotlight was so brief that they should really just be one of many forgotten eighties bands who never ‘made it’, but there is something rather memorable about the band’s hit single – What’s The Colour Of Money? – that despite it being their only hit, most people of a certain age will remember the song well. If is the 1987 album from which the single is taken, and it is being reissued next month as a two-CD deluxe edition. 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.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." 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). A lot of people want to sound like somebody else; I respect a lot of people but I sure as hell don't want to sound like them. Someone from Chrysalis once came to see me play and said 'I like the music but at the moment we're looking for another Blondie'. I said 'Well that I ain't!'

Hollywood Beyond was the brainchild of singer-songwriter Mark Rogers. Their first single, "What's the Colour of Money?", reached No. 7 on the UK Singles Chart in 1986. [2] The song also reached No. 8 in the Netherlands, No. 21 in Germany and No. 14 in Switzerland. The follow-up single, "No More Tears", peaked at No. 47 in the UK. [2] 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. A lot of music now has no soul... Soul isn't a category in a record shop, it's someone singing or playing from the heart." 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...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). 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

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 has the lead singer of Hollywood Beyond been up to these past three decades? Will Simpson finds out…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. 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. 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.