“In ways large and small, in both art and life, Tupac Shakur instinctively pushed past customary boundaries,” Connie Bruck wrote in this magazine, in 1997. She could not have known how right she was. Since he was killed, in Las Vegas, in 1996, Tupac Shakur has released twice as many albums as he did while he was sentient. Plans for a bio-pic might have ended in deadlock, but IMDB is keeping hope alive. Some conspiracy theorists remain in the first D.A.B.D.A. stage, insisting that Tupac faked his own death. Yet even with all this competition, the award for Greatest/Creepiest Monument to Nostalgia has to go to the organizers of the Coachella music festival in Indio, California, where, last night, Tupac was revived in the form of a hologram. (Perhaps we have an eighteen-year itch in addition to a forty-year itch.) Hologram-’Pac looked as if he hadn’t aged a day. His flow on his 1997 single “Hail Mary” was still raw and charismatic; he shared an easy rapport with Snoop Dogg on “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted”; and his inked obliques looked as chiseled as ever. One wonders if this will inspire CNN to bring back its own baffling hologram technology—or, for that matter, whether other marquee performers will start literally phoning in their performances via Skype, or simply recording them ahead of time. Crowds across America may want to see “Niggaz in Paris” nine times in a row, but why should Jay-Z and Kanye themselves be forced to endure the repetition?
Tupac’s Creepy Hologram
