Hologram Concerts Don’t Suck, You’re Just a Hater

Plenty of critics have directed their ire at the practice, calling it “creepy,” the result of a “greedily capitalist society” that plays god by resurrecting the dead for a quick buck. Earlier this year, a Bloomberg writer argued, “The holographic tours are just one example of how tech entrepreneurs are trying to abolish death.” They are wrong.

This sort of histrionic criticism of hologram concerts comes almost entirely from people who have never actually attended one. Even before I saw it for myself, I had a feeling I was going to thoroughly enjoy holo-Roy because I have a deep respect for late capitalist trash. It’s 2018 and I’m in the United States of America—if I can’t hang out with digital reincarnations of my dead idols, what’s the point of living in this hellishly beautiful mecca of celebrity-worship and consumerism.

“Do you dress up to see a hologram?” my boyfriend asked me before the show.

“I guess?” I replied, opting to wear trousers instead of my usual sweatpants, as a meaningless expression of courtesy for the cyber-reincarnation of Roy Orbison I would soon behold. It was a bitingly chilly November evening, and sadly for me, the all-time great singer, who died five years before I was born, couldn’t land a post-mortem gig in the Big Apple, so I had to make the journey to the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts in Long Island.

I asked an older couple named David and Karen why they came to see the show, and they didn’t have anything particularly deep to say about what it means to resurrect the dead. Instead, David explained they were always big Roy Orbison fans, and never got to see him perform while he was alive, so they thought it would be fun. The audience was about as excited as a room full of elderly people on a Saturday night could possibly be. Gary, the man sitting in front of me, said that he came to see the show because he had seen Natalie Cole perform with her hologram father in 1991, and he was hoping the technology had improved since then.

As it turns out, even holograms get opening acts. To warm the crowd up, Julian Frampton (son of Peter) played a couple tunes, making sure to self-deprecate between songs, joking that he is also a hologram. “I was in college when I was listening to Peter Frampton. That was over 30 years ago,” I heard an audience member remark. The crowd responded to Julian Frampton with extreme warmth, the way you’d expect a doting great-aunt to congratulate you on a minor achievement.

The projection of Orbison wasn’t Roy Orbison at all, but rather an actor portraying his likeness with the rockstar’s face CGI-ed onto him. Marty Tudor, the CEO of Base Hologram Productions, which organized the show, was quick to challenge me when I called the technology “a hologram of a Roy Orbison impersonator.”