Don’t expect a posthumous hologram concert from Dolly Parton — she’s not interested.
Musicians like ABBA and Whitney Houston have been digitally immortalized with hologram performances in recent years, and the country superstar shot down the idea of her own during a Thursday press conference for her upcoming Rockstar album.
“I think I’ve left a great body of work behind,” said Parton, 77, per The Independent. “I have to decide how much of that high-tech stuff I want to be involved [with] because I don’t want to leave my soul here on this earth.”
“I think with some of this stuff I’ll be grounded here forever,” the “Jolene” performer continued. “I’ll be around, we’ll find ways to keep me here.”
Infusing a bit of her classic humor into her feelings toward a hologram concert, Parton quipped that “everything” about her — such as “any intelligence” — was already artificial, per the outlet.
Musicians have expressed differing opinions on hologram concerts. Last year, ABBA launched ABBA: Voyage in London, and the band recorded their own performances using motion capture technology. “What you’re gonna see when you come to this show is us,” said co-founder Benny Andersson in 2021.
Victoria Beckham said last year that she’s unsure about committing to a Spice Girls reunion tour but open to a hologram concert, as the girl group’s manager Simon Fuller orchestrated ABBA: Voyage. “That’s a great idea,” said Posh Spice at the time.
Of course, both of those instances are hologram concerts crafted while the performers are still alive. Earlier this year, Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park said he would not be interested in performing with a hologram of the band’s late vocalist Chester Bennington, who died by suicide in 2017.
In an interview with 94.5 The Buzz, Shinoda said the band refuses to perform alongside a virtual version of Bennington, despite one of the radio hosts telling him she’d pay “good money” to see it.
“I feel like those are creepy. Even if we weren’t talking about us, if we weren’t talking about Chester, which is a very sensitive subject, and we would have our feelings about how we would represent that,” said the vocalist and multi-instrumentalist. “For me, that’s a clear no. I’m not into that.”
Shinoda spoke about ABBA’s hologram show, noted that he’s a fan of the “Mamma Mia” performers and explained why that’s different than depicting a deceased band member onstage.
“They’re all still here, and yet they wanna do it this way because they wanna transport you back to that moment in time where those songs were new and it was whatever era it was,” he explained. “I get that. I see that. I’m not positive, even under those circumstances, I’m not positive I personally would buy a ticket to the show. But [other people] would. That’s fine.”
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