Holograms: Movers & Shakurs

So how do you feel about hologram Tupac?

Personally, I think this is a great idea in a novelty sense, there’s shock and awe, the technology’s really incredible and they probably scared a few people as well in the process.

But if people start using this technique more I can’t see a lot of good coming out of it, and for the same reasons why I have a problem with miming and using autotune in a live performance, because it takes away from the idea of the concert.

When people pay to see a person or a band performing for them that’s what they expect, a performance. When someone, be it Britney Spears or whoever the hell else, mimes to a recording for the whole show then it’s basically thousands of people sitting around and listening to the same CD.

Surely the point of performing is to actually play to people in person, an experience that you can only mildly simulate in a recording?

Not only is it dishonest, it’s a betrayal of sorts to the people that paid, let’s be honest, way too much money, extortionate prices even, to go and see an artist that surely isn’t that busy in their day that they can’t be arsed to sing for the thousands of screaming fans they’ve gained through years of (supposedly) hard work?

That’s besides the point on this hologram event however, although some of the comments I’ve heard regarding what we could possibly do with this technology have got me a little worried about where people would be willing to take this.

When people talk about using old footage of Kurt Cobain to have a ‘Nirvana reunion’… that just doesn’t feel right to me at all.

A couple of minutes? That could be nice.

But a whole tour where centre stage is a dead man who can neither approve or deny what’s being done? The main attraction? A miracle for ticket sales?

No, that’s twisted to me, which really makes me want to ask the question of whether that’s a rational disgust or not, because it feels sort of irrational.

On that note then, who would you like to see hologram’d?

You get a top three, and you can’t pick Tupac or Kurt Cobain. Also, by nature of the game they would have to be dead, so no ‘Bob Dylan back when he still played acoustic’.

Join The (27) Club!

So I heard the other day that on comparing Amy Winehouse to the other members of the infamous 27 club, Zane Lowe referred to her fellow clubbers as ‘not artists’, now, I didn’t witness this myself, so this may be completely and utterly wrong, however, even if this wasn’t the case, with any of these celebrity deaths, glorifying them seems a little out of place, especially considering the disrespect Winehouse showed repeatedly towards her life and in light of recent events in Norway, who’s more important to the public? Close to a hundred innocent civilians with their whole lives ahead of them, or a woman who dedicated her life to destroying herself from the inside out and wouldn’t take rehab for an answer.

If anyone didn’t get that joke, let me rub it in your face. She said no no no.

But even the other members of the 27 club had just as much if not much more influence than Winehouse, and to say that people such as Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain are ‘not artists’ is pretty insane to say the least.

Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and even Richie Edwards had some sort of influence equal to if not greater than her considering the time that has passed since, I suppose we’ll see for how long she will be glorified following her passing.

But it’s a funny thing that people tend to forget the misadventures of the dead, from everyone trying to pretend that Amy Winehouse hadn’t been steadily killing herself for many years to pretending Michael Jackson wasn’t a paedophile.

What people have to realise is that you can detach the person from the music, it doesn’t mike MJ a crap singer because he liked to touch kids, and it doesn’t make Winehouse a crap singer because she was a junkie, but to deny these things is a ridiculous ploy.

Take Wagner for example, a brilliant composer and raging anti-Semite, and yet his music is still recognised as great.

these things can happen, and denialism doesn’t help anyone, least not the memories of the dead.

And while the news goes on about one dead celebrity, let us prefer to think about those in Norway who were killed without a choice, Amy chose to die, these Norwegians had their lives stolen from them unfairly and unjustly, and to say we should mourn them both equally, although it sounds fair, means that I’d have to mourn 92 or so times more for the Norwegians than I should for Amy Winehouse, I rest my case.