Snoop Dogg collaborated with an old friend at Coachella. That old friend also happens to be long dead. It's Tupac Shakur.
Initially, I thought it was pretty cool. It almost gave me chills. It's Tupac, although prolific, dead since '96. How many kids at Coachella were even going to concerts in '96?
But then, I thought where this could go. Nirvana with a hologram Kurt, Queen with a hologram Freddie, the Beatles could reunite. This isn't just lip syncing, this is persona syncing. Besides the fact it's more than a little creepy, it's not live music. The hologram doesn't get a say in the matter, and it makes an already too plastic world all the more artificial.
A big Alice in Chains fan, I never caught them live when Layne was alive. I did see them about five years ago with a Layne sound-alike, and I enjoyed the show, but would I have gone to see a Layne hologram? No way. Layne's dead, and with his death came an end to seeing him live in concert. That's how it works.
What do you think of the Tupac hologram? Would you like to see more dead artists resurrected via Pepper's Ghost or CGI or whatever brought Tupac to Coachella in 2012?
