Dead Hip Hop Stars Resurrected at 2013 Rock The Bells Festival
After Tupak graced the stage at Coachella in 2012 with the help of some hologram technology, N.W.A.'s Eazy-E and Wu-Tang Clan's Ol' Dirty Bastard have performed posthumously at the 2013 Rock The Bells Festival.
The two rappers' families paired up with AV Concepts, an audiovisual company that also created the Tupac illusion at the Coachella music festival in California in 2012. "Physically, how these two holograms were created, the digital manipulation and recreating the likeness into a body double was similar to what we used for Tupac but we've added to the content. They will be performing multiple songs, under 10 minutes, and will be part of the overall performance," said AV Concepts co-founder Nick Smith.
Smith says he hopes to one day create a hologram of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, though nothing is yet in the works. Although the projected images are sometimes loosely labeled "holograms," they are actually two-dimensional images and not holograms, which are three-dimensional.
Eazy-E will perform with his protégés, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Lil Eazy E [Eric Wright, Jr.] served as the body of the avatar and his brother, E3 [Derrick Wright] is the voice. Eazy's daughter Erin, is the face.
For the ODB hologram, Young Dirty Bastard, one of the late rapper's sons, was heavily involved in the image's creation, though his voice was not used.
Smith would not divulge the budgets for either hologram but said that a "large project" could start at $100,000 and get into the millions, "depending on the amount of content you want to create." He also added that the "promoter understood the value of what it took to do Tupac and wasn't scared by any of the cost."
The technology used to project Eazy-E, ODB and Tupac has existed since the Victorian Era, something Smith acknowledged. "It's not so much the technology and the wow factor anymore. People have accepted this kind of technology as a normal display medium. Now it's about how it can be used in other situations, like Bill Gates having a conversation with a Steve Jobs hologram about where technology could go today, hypothetically of course."
While Smith insisted that a Jobs "hologram" was not in the works he did add, "if it was an accurate representation of what Steve Jobs would say, I think it would be interesting to think about broadcasting two people like that together. If it was something [Jobs] talked about we could use a similar method, if it is something made up and never talked about, that's getting into territory that is for the producers that want to create the event to decide. It's another situation, and we're hungry to do something different."
Eazy-E died in Mar. 1995 at the age of 31, and Ol' Dirty Bastard died in 2004 at 35 years of age. Eazy-E recorded the hit song "Foe tha Love of $" with Bone Thugs prior to his death in 1995, while ODB was a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan.
Other top-line artists at this year's festival include Common, Rakim, Black Hippy, Kid Cudi, Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, The Creator. The two-day festival will head to San Bernardino, Calif. on Sept. 7-8; Mountain View, Calif. on Sept. 14-15; Washington, D.C. on Sept. 28-29; and Rutherford, N.J. on Oct. 4-5.
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