Tupac Shakur has been dead for 15 years now, but it didn’t stop the epic West Coast rapper from performing at Coachella over the weekend.
The appearance came with Snoop Dogg’s Coachella-closing performance Sunday night, and Tupac was one of many surprises in the star-studded performance- but likely the only rapper joining the stage from the great hereafter. Pac greeted fans with an especially creepy “what the **** up, Coachella?” referring to by name the festival at which he was performing but had not been invented until several years after his death.
Tupac was able to perform at the packed festival with the aid of modern technology, beamed to the stage via a hologram apparently originating in uncanny valley. And despite fifteen years of being dead, Pac was able to join pal Snoop onstage to perform ghostly renditions of “Come With Me,” “Hail Mary” and “Gangsta Party” while Coachella attendees and people sitting at home reacted to what might have been the first explainable Tupac sighting.
As an aside, while the progression of technology cannot be stopped, it’s kind of uncool that we are using people’s likenesses this way after they die. I hate to sound like a luddite, but it used to be that dead people stayed dead (except for Elvis), and aside from impersonators that were clearly tributes, we didn’t have them getting up and performing for crowds of frat boys.
Perhaps Tupac would have hated Coachella, or despised the lineup, or retired or what have you had he not been tragically gunned down at the age of 24. It just seems to… non-consensual to have a dead man perform on stage in such an eerie likeness. (Eminem, Wiz Khalifa and Dr. Dre also joined Snoop on stage during the performance.)
Clip is below (with some NSFW language because it’s Tupac), did you catch Tupac performing at Coachella this weekend?
