HOLLYWOOD BEYOND Whats The Colour of Money UK 7" 45

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If a pattern doesn't fall into a bar in the machine it can be difficult to isolate what I want. But I can read it from the TR707 display and reprogram it." 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? 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.

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

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. 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 won't say what it is because I hate it. It's not an SP12, because I've worked with that and I'd like to get one soon, and it's not a TR707 because I like that, too. I'm not very good with drum machines, so the display on the TR707 is great. When I'm writing, I don't pay too much attention to the start and end of the bars - I like to play with the tap facility and try to get into the feel of the rhythm I want. The trouble is that if the pattern doesn't fall into a proper bar in the machine, it can be difficult to isolate the bit I want. With the 707 I can read it from the display and reprogram it. I'm not a drummer and I don't pretend to understand a lot of rhythmic things from a drummer's point of view so, to me, that little screen is one of the most valuable parts of the machine. 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’. The ideas tend to come when I go walking or something. I like making rhythms with my feet and things like that. 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.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.

What I really like about UMI is the sound library - it means I can have a large selection of sounds available without having to have a huge amount of equipment. I drag things in, I steal their sounds, I put them on disk and that makes life a lot easier from a writing point of view. Different sounds evoke different emotions, so the bigger your library, the greater your choice of emotions."

When is the HOLLYWOOD sign? Deconstructing the bundling and hierarchization of enregistered features