HOLLYWOOD BEYOND Whats The Colour of Money UK 7" 45

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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. 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). 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?” You had a striking image at that point. Did you have people come up to you on the street singing the hit?

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.

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

Hollywood Beyond achieved considerable chart success in a number of European territories as well as the UK. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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’. 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.

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... 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). Whilst at University, “I met up with new friends who shared the love of jazz funk which led to us forming a group called Pyramid.” They were almost signed to Mark Dean’s record label, Innervision, but Dean apparently could only afford to take on one act at the time and chose Wham! Pyramid garnered further interest from Duran Duran’s management but as Mark wasn’t prepared to drop out of university, he decided against it. “We were an instrumental group doing a lot of university gigs and supported acts like Level 42, etc and quite often the main acts pulled the plug on us because we were tooo good,” Mark explained. “I remember our bass player at the time, Paul Snook, blew away the bassist for Level 42 and they weren’t happy – they switched off the sound. Paul is a top producer now in New York working with people like of Mary J. Blige.” 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). 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.

Behind Hollywood Beyond

When is the HOLLYWOOD sign? Deconstructing the bundling and hierarchization of enregistered features 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] 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). 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 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 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.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. 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). 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."