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). 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. 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. 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'. 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."

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. 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 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." 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. 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). 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 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. 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.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?.