“The excitement you feel while listening to it comes from the idea of the two talking, not from what’s actually said,” wrote Jay Caspian Kang.
Like the hologram, Lamar’s conversation with Shakur was more impressive for its technological novelty than its actual content. With Afeni’s blessing, Lamar spliced in his own questions to Shakur’s responses, characterizing himself in one pseudo prompt is “one of your offsprings of the legacy you left behind.” The conversation, so to speak, touches upon some of Shakur’s favored topics: how the American system “take the heart and soul out of a man,” how one needed to balance self-enrichment with the good of the community, and how the next Black revolution would be infinitely more deadly than the 1992 LA uprising. Lamar had found an unpublished audio interview with Shakur from November 1994, two weeks before the rapper’s life and career were irrevocably altered by the Quad Studios shooting. After reading a brief spoken-word piece titled “Mortal Man,” Lamar channels the spirit of Shakur, in a way. Hip-hop is known for paying loving tribute to its fallen soldiers, and Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 revivification of Shakur at the end of his album To Pimp a Butterfly provided a sonic equivalent of the Coachella hologram. Five years after Coachella, Shakur was granted pop music’s two most hallowed forms of cultural enshrinement: he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with a moving induction speech delivered by Snoop, and had his story retold through the biopic All Eyez on Me (also supervised by Afeni), which was, appropriately enough, acclaimed less for its screenplay or direction than for Demetrius Shipp Jr.’s uncannily accurate embodiment of Shakur. In 2003, Shakur’s story was made into an Oscar- nominated documentary and book, aptly titled Resurrection, with both productions supervised by his mother. His image and “thug life” mantra had reached iconographic status in officially sanctioned and bootleg form, and because his murder was still unsolved, numerous documentaries and homemade YouTube videos had proffered their own theories about what really happened in Las Vegas. As Greil Marcus wrote about Elvis’s second life, Shakur “made history” while he was alive, and “when he died, maybe people found themselves caught up in the adventure of remaking his history, which is to say their own.” By 2012, Tupac’s posthumously released albums outnumbered those issued during his short life. Well before his 2012 performance, Shakur had ascended to a rarefied level of American cultural memory: the eternal presentness of the prematurely dead. “If a reconstruction is to be credible, it must be absolutely iconic, a perfect likeness, a ‘real’ copy of the reality being represented.” The man who had devoted the final five years of his life to a performative project of scandalous Black American realism had been resurrected by holography, a technological phenomenon that made him even more quintessentially American than his Las Vegas death. (Zoladz also noted that Eazy‑E had been revitalized by the same technology, with motion-capture performances staged by his children and supervised by his widow, Tomica.) “Holography could prosper only in America, a country obsessed with realism,” wrote Umberto Eco in an essay about wax museums. Lindsay Zoladz compared the effect to the Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous appearance in Puff Daddy and Ma$e’s 1997 “Mo Money Mo Problems” video and the glowing ghost of Eazy‑E in Bone Thugs‑n‑Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads” clip. When the reconstituted Shakur appeared onstage and yelled, “What the fuck is up, Coachella?!” the effect was uncanny and, for many, quite moving. Shakur’s presence came courtesy of an expensive, realistic holographic projection that replicated his vocal timbre and body movements with eerie accuracy. The setting was the thirteenth annual Coachella Festival, the multi-day music and arts event that drew fans from around the world to the rolling green hills of Indio, California, two hours east of Los Angeles. In April 2012, more than fifteen years after his death, Tupac Shakur once again performed “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” with his erstwhile collaborator, who by then was going by the name Snoop Dogg. The following is an excerpt from Eric Harvey‘s newly published ‘Who Got the Camera?: A History of Rap and Reality’ via the University of Texas Press, © 2021. Support truly independent journalism by subscribing to Passion of the Weiss on Patreon.
0 kommentar(er)
