Hologram Tupac Was Inevitable

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Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Coachella
The rapper's high-tech resurrection at Coachella this past weekend embodied what Shakur has become in death: pure image, nostalgic totem, and ghastly spectacle.
Apr 17 2012, 8:37 AM ET 12
Jack Hamilton - Jack Hamilton is a writer and student in the History of American Civilization program at Harvard University.

In 1981, Rolling Stone famously slapped a photo of Jim Morrison on its cover to go with the headline: "He's Hot, He's Sexy and He's Dead." It's an important moment in the history of commodified nostalgia, the start of rock's most iconic publication selling magazines off memories of its own adolescence. After all, Rolling Stone began publication in late 1967, only a few months after Morrison's band broke through with "Light My Fire." The headline is catchy but slightly unseemly, the "He's Hot, He's Sexy" tinged with insistence. Here was rock music awkwardly reckoning with encroaching middle-age: Ten years after Morrison had successfully died before he'd gotten old, a whole world of people were starting to realize they hadn't.

On Sunday night at the Coachella Festival in Indio, California, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg shared a stage with a holographic rendering of Tupac Shakur. Within a few hours the performance had exploded on YouTube, creating a veritable symphony of simulacra and simulation that's sure to launch an entire subfield of academic media studies, replete with endless, groan-inducing "All Eyez On Me" puns. Sure, Hologram Tupac can tell us a lot of things about technology and representation and the internets and The Power of Social Media, but they are all things that we already know, and this latest development just takes them to discomfiting extremes. In other words, it's not shocking that Hologram Tupac exists; it's shocking that it's taken so long.

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It's impossible to imagine, of course—to separate the voice on those records from all the glory and ruination that came after it. Over the past 16 years, a lot of Tupac's music has been gradually sullied by all that's followed. "Dear Mama" is held up to make him a sensitive feminist, which he wasn't, while "Hit 'Em Up" is held up to make him a hyper-violent gangsta, which he wasn't either. In life these contradictions were compelling, the mark of a ridiculously talented artist with a genuinely tormented worldview. But in death it's just incoherence, amplified through artifice and hagiography.

And maybe that's why Hologram Tupac, besides being weird and impressive and disturbing and riveting and frankly hilarious, should set us on edge. While Tupac's death was senseless and awful, it was also the casualty of a period of terrible violence in hip-hop, and if you need your memory refreshed, go reread Lynn Hirschberg's extraordinary New York Times Magazine profile of Suge Knight, published eight months before Tupac's murder. It's amazing that rap lived through all that, even if Pac and Biggie didn't, and it's a time the music still hasn't fully reckoned with. Hologram Tupac fills a still-open cultural wound with animatronic kitsch, spinning tragedy into a stupid amusement park ride: Next week on Glee, "Keep Ya Head Up!" The late Lizard King who graced that 1981 Rolling Stone cover once remarked that "death makes angels of us all / gives us wings where we have shoulders / smooth as ravens' claws." As poetry goes it's pretty lousy, but replace "angels" with "holograms" and he might be on to something.

More: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/hologram-tupac-was-inevitable/255990/#