[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajVGIRsKXdo]
It wasn’t nothin’ but a gangsta party when Tupac stormed the stage at Coachella last weekend to take part in a relative orgy of west coast hop-hop nostalgia.
Of course the long-dead rapper did so as a three-dimensional hologram. Whether you see this as Star Wars meets Hip Hop or merely an ill-advised, unnecessary stunt, let technophiles quibble about the quality of the hologram.
What’s interesting will be the future discussions of the implications of this concept. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to see the Beatles put together a full reunion tour, or the Who with Keith Moon back behind the drums?
It is often difficult to differentiate Tupac’s many posthumous album releases from each other, since the rapper is more prolific dead than he was alive. So imagine for a moment the day when his estate decides to release an album of new material and send Hologram ‘Pac on the road to perform the material “live” from beyond the grave.
Rock and roll history is littered with musicians who lived hard and died young. The blurring of life and death made possible through technology should at least give us a moment’s pause. It may soon be possible for fans to pay to see favorite rock stars rise from the dead for one last performance.
But we should at least question why we’d truly want to.
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