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

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. 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. As a language object and symbolic resource, HOLLYWOOD has become ‘emblematically’ (Agha Reference Agha2006:235) associated with a set of values that facilitate its diffusion and spread into new contexts, domains, and genres. It is one of many global emblems, Footnote 3 examples of which are, among others, derived from art (e.g. the Mona Lisa), architecture (e.g. the Great Wall), and music (e.g. Vivaldi's Spring), all providing fodder for a bewildering array of interpretations, reproductions, and adaptations. Writing about perhaps the most renowned of global emblems, the Eiffel Tower, Barthes ( Reference Barthes2012:131) observes that ‘the Tower is everything man [sic] puts into it… an inimitable object that is endlessly reproduced, it is a pure sign’. At turns lauded and despised by artists, poets, and cultural critics, the Tower assumed the role of ‘modernist visual icon’ (Conley Reference Conley2010:765; also see Insausti Reference Insausti, Homem and de Fátima Lambert2006) before evolving into ‘the Esperanto of tourism’ (Freeman Reference Freeman2016:118). Whether it is interpreted as a symbol of romance or a hallmark of sophisticated cultural cachet, likenesses of the Eiffel Tower are ubiquitous motifs, adorning t-shirts, accessories, advertisements, and handheld figurines, alongside nearly to-scale monuments in cities such as Macau, Hangzhou, and Las Vegas. The proliferation of such landmarks and souvenirs are indicative of an emblem's diffuse interpretations; as Löfgren ( Reference Löfgren1999:88) writes, ‘There might be millions of tiny brass Eiffel Towers distributed over the globe, but no two of them carry the same meanings’. 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.

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?” 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'. 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." I wrote it in five minutes and knew it was a hit straight away. The record company agreed but warned me that, “It will either make you or break you”. I said, “Well let’s just roll with it.” 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).

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 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). 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.

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. 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. On another, more technical level, Rogers also has his reasons for mixing and matching producers from both sides of the Atlantic. 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.

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." 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 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."

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

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).