With a world tour commencing in February, R&B legend Whitney Houston could be coming to a city near you — despite being deceased for eight years. The tour, announced via Instagram by the singer-cum-movie star-cum-queer icon’s estate in September, will be in conjunction with BASE Hologram, a company whose website boasts their ability not only to “captivate audiences” but to “open revenue streams,” a lovely way to parse capitalizing on the dead, enslaving their likeness for financial gain. Although the response this announcement has been mixed as all responses are, a quick look through the comments on IG reveals strong backlash amid the excitement. Some call the move “disgraceful,” “solely motivated by money,” and more; one comment even describes the hologram tour as “a satanic projection.”
This raises the question: are hologram tours disrespectful toward the deceased artists they emulate? Does the inability of a deceased person to consent to being impersonated in this way invalidate the need for that consent?
The first hologram concert I ever heard of was at Coachella in 2012, when a surprisingly high-fidelity projection of Tupac Shakur hopped onstage for a performance of “Hail Mary” and “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted,” a feat impressive enough to reignite conspiracy theories regarding the rapper’s demise and to produce some general unease regarding the intellectual property of the dead. Even then, a concern I heard from others and which I shared was whether Pac would have been okay with it all. Sure, ownership of the songs passed to someone when he died, but this doesn’t mean someone owns his voice, his face, his mannerisms… does it? Similar questions arise for more and more artists (others given the posthumous hologram treatment include Ronny James Dio, Juan Gabriel, Michael Jackson, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard) as this trend seems to accelerate, approaching takeoff.
Legally, there is a distinction between one’s intellectual property rights and their personality rights. First of all, the latter is far less thoroughly developed in America than the former. Whereas intellectual property is protected abundantly by federal and state laws alike, there is no federal law which recognizes a person’s right to control the commercial use of their identity by others. State laws variously protect these rights, however; California’s Celebrity Rights Act of 1985 for example ensures that a public person’s estate maintains control over the commercial use of their identity for seventy years after their death.
I know my stance is extreme, but I would argue that even this is not far enough. It simply should not be legal to use a dead person’s identity for monetary gain. Whether it’s 2Pac or Michael Jackson or Whitney, to create the convincing illusion that you have resurrected an artist in order to make them perform for you occurs to me as a far cry from simply continuing to enjoy the art they themselves produced in life. The macabre details aside, I see no ethical distinction which elevates a hologram tour above the act of digging up an artist’s corpse and traipsing it around onstage like a puppet. Hologram tours signify a sort of capitalism wherein nothing is sacred… and if anything is going to be sacred enough to fight for, it’s Whitney Houston.
I understand the temptation. I never got the chance to see Whitney perform in concert, and the same subtle emptiness creeps into my soul, too, at the thought of never seeing with my own eyes how she gracefully pivots across the stage, never hearing with my own ears the way only Whitney could perform such ballads as “I Have Nothing.” I know why, given the carrots and sticks in place today, this technology has come to be. But to quote the imminent Ian Malcolm, the “scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Whitney Houston owned her voice, and her presence in the spaces she occupied. Can this really be passed on in a last will and testament?
I don’t think it can.