Dead Precedents by Roy Christopher

Author:Roy Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

Tupac Shakur at Coachella, 2012. Photo by Eric Smith-Gunn.

Though they were both posthumously honored with film biographies, Biggie in 2008’s Notorious and Tupac in 2017’s All Eyez on Me, Tupac reemerged on stage on April 15, 2012 at the Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California as a “hologram.” The ghostly image, which was accompanied on stage by Tupac’s peers and former Death Row label mates, Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, was actually a nineteenth-century theater special effect known as a Pepper’s Ghost, a trick that has also been used to create apparitions in haunted houses. John Henry Pepper, after whom the effect is named, along with Henry Dircks, developed the technique to make ghosts appear on stage during theatrical productions. The effect debuted in December 1862 at the Royal Polytechnic in London and made its way into early film as well. In his book Gothic Machine, David J. Jones describes it as, “the spectralization of a live human body: here the magic lantern did not just project slides showing simulacra of the body onto a hidden screen or smoke, but illuminated and cast the eidolon of the body itself onto the stage.”

One critic of the time described the effect as “a perfect embodiment of real substance.” To which Jones adds, “That ‘real substance’ is indicative: this was a living, breathing image which seemed to possess, especially post-1863, all the mobility and dimensionality of a three-dimensional body turning in space.” Visual effects company Digital Domain used the effect to reanimate Tupac at Coachella, much to the awe of the music fans present and those who have seen it via the internet. Multiple lines are crossed here. This is a new level of resurrecting the past. The use of samples of dead artists reanimates them into new lives. The DJ converges the once separate realms of recorded music and live performance by playing records on turntables as instruments. Tupac’s hologram brought his physical body back to life, live on stage.

In the summer of 2015, Chief Keef tried to use a hologram appearance to avoid outstanding warrants in his hometown of Chicago. The young rapper, who became the face of the city’s violence once his shirtless video for “I Don’t Like” went from South-Side anthem to nationwide hit, moved to the West Coast after signing a multimillion-dollar record deal. At the time of the video, Keef was on house arrest for pointing a gun at a police officer at age fifteen. In 2015 though, he was trying to organize a “Stop the Killing” benefit show for two of his fallen friends. On July 11, thirteen-month-old Dillan Harris was killed by a car fleeing the scene of the shooting that killed fellow rapper Marvin “Capo” Carr.

Originally slated for Pilsen’s Redmoon Theatre in Chicago, the show was moved a week later to Craze Fest at Wolf Lake Pavilion in Hammond, Indiana after Chicago’s mayor deemed it too dangerous. After saying, “Chicago, we need to stop the violence. Let our kids live,” his hologram was able to get through one song before it was shut down.

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