01 Mar Tupac Has New Management, But Don't Expect A Hologram Tour
Tupac Has New Management, But Don’t Expect A Hologram Tour
http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2013/03/01/tupac-has-new-management-but-dont-expect-a-hologram-tour/
Zack O’Malley Greenburg, Forbes Staff
3/01/2013 @ 1:00PM
Tupac Shakur is being resurrected – again. But not in the way you might think.
Last month Shakur’s mother, Afeni, reached an agreement to have Jeff Jampol’s Jampol Artist Management oversee her son’s estate. Record executive Tom Whalley, who signed the rapper to his first deal, will work on music projects; attorney Peter Paterno will handle legal matters.
Shakur made headlines last year when he appeared as a hologram – or, more specifically, as an old 2D illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost – alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre at the Coachella music festival. So it may come as a surprise to some that Jampol shot down rumors of a hologram tour in a recent interview with FORBES.
“A [solo] hologram tour I find disingenuous, boring, and I think it perverts the very idea of a live show – live music is all about a moment,” he said. “There’s nonverbal two-way communication. It’s spontaneous and real, and it’s occurring right in front of you. That’s the magic.”
Still, Jampol says he’ll be exploring other new ways to bring Shakur to a new generation of audiences with the help of technological advances. He imagines something akin to the 21st Century version of the Pink Floyd laser shows that began in the 1970s – a live experience that doesn’t necessarily include actual performers.
Creating fresh sources of cash is particularly important for Shakur’s estate, which has already licensed out many of its key rights and has released most of the extensive cache of music that the rapper left behind. As a result, the rapper’s posthumous earnings last were about one-third the $9 million he generated in 2007. Jampol will try to reverse that trend.
“I think that you’ll see new streams of income from additional forms of licensing and things that just didn’t exist five years ago,” says attorney Donald David, who has worked with the estate for years.
The estate’s efforts may be aided by changing attitudes over Shakur and his legacy. Perhaps known best at the time of his death for his advocacy of “Thug Life”and all things gangster, recent years have seen greater emphasis on Shakur’s intellectual and activist side.
In 2000, his spoken-word album The Rose That Grew From Concrete featured luminaries from Mos Def to Nikki Giovanni reading his poetry. His life and work formed the basis of symposium at Harvard in 2003. Most recently, Atlanta hosted the first Tupac Amaru Shakur Collection Conference on Hip-Hop, Education and Expanding the Archival Imagination.
Look for that part of Shakur’s narrative to play an increasingly large role in future moves by his estate.
“We want the story – we want the raison d’etre,” said Jampol. “And we want to expose people to Tupac.”
UPDATE: Jeff Jampol responded to my story with a clarification of his stance on hologram tours. I think it adds an interesting dimension – no pun intended – to the article, and I’d like to share it with my readers:
“As we had discussed, my feeling is that creative uses of holograms as part of a bigger whole can be groundbreaking, creative and a very cool part of a much bigger entertainment experience. For instance, Dre and Snoop’s performance at Coachella, with the Tupac ‘hologram,’ was revolutionary, inspiring and just plain old… awesome. But a ‘solo hologram tour’ in which patrons sit in an uncomfortable chair watching a pre-programmed hologram ‘perform’? Yawn.”