HOLLYWOOD BEYOND Whats The Colour of Money UK 7" 45

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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? 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!'

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.” 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. 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."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’. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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). 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.