First of all Happy 4/20! I will be attending the 17th annual 4/20 gathering at the VAG (Vancouver Art Gallery) this afternoon, so I thought I'd get in an early post before I get well sedated :)
The biggest story from the first weekend of the Coachella Music Festival has been about a performer who wasn't actually even there. As you've no doubt heard 2Pac - who died in 1996 - performed live at Coachella with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre - in the form of a hologram. Now I'm sure that if you're a big fan and you were at Coachella on acid or something, then I'll bet this was quite a trip. However, the implications of this have been in my thoughts all week - the Pandora's box has been opened - and we can never go back. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGbrFmPBV0Y
While Tupac's mother approves of this, I most certainly do not. I came across this cheeky item a couple days ago - for Coachella 2013 - featuring an all hologram lineup!
This is just wrong - and I don't mean just because The Beatles aren't headlining Sunday! I know that Damon Albarn has used this technology with the Gorillaz - but that was a different thing - it was to bring cartoon characters to life that were of his own creation. In the case of Tupac they're using a dead man's likeness as a performance puppet. He even greets the crowd with 'Wtf is up Coachella?' - who's saying that? Coachella started three years after he died - he never said that in his life, so it isn't sampled or prerecorded - it's FAKE. And of course it's without his consent. I suppose musicians will have to start stipulating in their wills whether or not they want their likeness used to perform for them after their deaths.
So what's next for Tupac - a co-headlining tour with Biggie? Apparently both the hologram's creators Digital Domain - and Snoop Dogg - have plans for a possible tour. Disgusting. I've already decided that I will never go to a 'concert' where a deceased artist is performing live as a hologram. Of course this is only the beginning - you know that someone somewhere in Memphis is already plotting the 'live' return of Elvis Presley (who's strangely absent from next year's Coachella lineup - I'm guessing because he's still alive!) with dollars signs in their eyes! Hopefully anyone with living relatives - as in the case of Elvis and The Beatles - would prevent such an atrocity from becoming a so-called reality. I certainly can't imagine John Lennon approving.
And once these hologram tours of dead artists start rising up everywhere you know it won't be a cheap show - I pity the fool willing to pay over $100 to see Bob Marley or whoever else may become a victim to this. They've already had numerous dead celebrities endorsing products on tv, so I guess this was inevitable, but I for one am not having it!
So let's tie in today's two themes - posthumous reality and 4/20 - with a classic from Raven Maize! 'The Real Life' was released as a single in the summer of 2001 on the Rulin Records label. The song blurs the lines of reality as well by featuring a vocal sample from Queen's song 'Bohemian Rhapsody' - who's singer Freddy Mercury died in 1991. Perhaps less obvious is that the song also nicks the keyboards from Simple Minds track 'Themes For Great Cities' from their 1981 album 'Sister Feeling Call'.
This is the 'Fatboy Slim Remix' of Raven Maize's 'The Real Life' - I particularly like the vocal breakdown around 5:20 in... Enjoy!
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