HOLLYWOOD BEYOND Whats The Colour of Money UK 7" 45

Product Information

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 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. 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). 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."

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." 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). 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. 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.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. 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'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. One thing I like about the American approach to recording is that everything is laid-down with effects on it. That way, your picture starts taking form as soon as you press the button and go. Some producers record things flat and say it'll be alright in the mix, but that's bullshit. As soon as you put anything to tape it's got to be effective so that, by the time you've put your last part down, you know how well your song is working and where its inadequacies are.

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.” 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.

Notes

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." 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." 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 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).

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. 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?.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.