Holograms?

Holograms, combined with live music, are becoming something of a rage now. After Tupac’s hologram performance from the grave at the Coachella music festival, other bands are coming out of the woodwork to bring back dead members in the new digital age.
Case in point is Queen, which is planning on using a holographic Freddie Mercury to perform at the 10th anniversary of the band’s musical, “We Will Rock You.”
Now, this is kind of cool and creepy all at once. Cool because, face it, ever since the original “Star Wars” movie came out, people thought holograms were awesome. Creepy because these people are dead and shouldn’t really be performing live still.
It also raises the ethical issue of using footage of a deceased person and parading it on stage for money. Say, in a hypothetical situation, Paul McCartney decided to use a hologram of John Lennon for his live shows to perform old Beatles songs. Since most Beatles fans have seen  live concert films of Lennon in “A Hard Days Night,” “Help!” and “Let It Be,” we would be paying to see nothing really new. Cool? Once again, yes, because holograms are awesome. But totally creepy as well.
I was unaware we had hologram technology like this until the 2008 election. There was Wolf Blitzer using holograms in his “War Room,” and I was stunned. But those holograms used living people, not old footage of dead politicians giving speeches.
So it is a double-edged sword. Holograms can be a cool concept, but they raise ethical issues of using a dead person’s image without their say.