{"id":804350,"date":"2020-02-19T07:20:50","date_gmt":"2020-02-19T14:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=954242"},"modified":"2020-02-19T07:20:50","modified_gmt":"2020-02-19T14:20:50","slug":"the-only-thing-missing-was-her-physically-inside-the-whitney-houston-hologram-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/music-news\/the-only-thing-missing-was-her-physically-inside-the-whitney-houston-hologram-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Only Thing Missing Was Her, Physically.\u2019 Inside the Whitney Houston Hologram Tour"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cGood evening, everyone, and welcome to Whitney Houston<\/a>, very much live,\u201d a holographic Whitney tells a small crowd of reporters in Los Angeles during a dress rehearsal for the late singer\u2019s upcoming \u201cAn Evening With Whitney: The Whitney Houston Hologram<\/a> Tour.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Houston has been dead for eight years, the creators behind the singer\u2019s hologram tour are looking to give a new tour experience to her audience. \u201cAn Evening With Whitney\u201d was designed with Whitney\u2019s image in mind, Pat Houston, the singer\u2019s former manager and head of the Whitney Houston estate, said. Whitney planned on giving a more intimate, unplugged-esque tour before she died. And while that never took place when she was alive, the production team behind the hologram has ensured her vision will happen posthumously.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a discussion about her doing \u2018Whitney Unplugged\u2019 or some type of \u2018Evening with Whitney,\u2019 and that was really her idea,\u201d Pat Houston said. \u201cIt\u2019s a dream that was realized by her. So that\u2019s the production. This isn\u2019t something that we\u2019re just putting together. This is something that she wanted to do, and I get very emotional watching this because it is so close to what she wanted. The only thing missing was her, physically.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The tour, set to kick off February 25th in Sheffield, England, is the latest from Base Holograms, the company behind the recent Buddy Holly\/Roy Orbison outing. While more hologram tours have sparked up in recent years, some critics are still quick to label the idea exploitative or creepy. But the Houston shows suggests that what seemed like one-off gimmicks when a virtual Tupac Shakur joined Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg<\/a> at Coachella may still become a mainstream entertainment medium.<\/p>\n

But those banking on hologram features becoming mainstays still have a long hill to climb. Ticket sales were weak for the Holly\/Orbison tour, averaging at just over half of tickets sold at each venue, according to Pollstar. The tour\u2019s two lowest-selling shows sold just 36% of their available tickets. Frank Zappa\u2019s hologram tour, which also took place in 2019, fared slightly better, selling a lukewarm 66% of tickets per show. Still, Houston is by far the biggest-selling artist to have their likeness tour as a hologram \u2013 she\u2019s No. 19 in all-time sales according to the Recording Industry Association of America \u2013 which could make her shows a bigger draw.<\/p>\n

The show is the result of five years of discussion, Base Hologram Productions CEO Marty Tudor said. Once the project got off the ground, it took another year to make it.<\/p>\n

The dress rehearsal showcased about two-thirds of the show, which will feature a live band and dancers choreographed by Fatima Robinson, who previously worked with Houston. The show will give audiences many of the singer\u2019s biggest hits, including \u201cI Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),\u201d \u201cI Have Nothing\u201d and her beloved rendition of Dolly Parton\u2019s \u201cI Will Always Love You.\u201d The hologram also performed Steve Winwood\u2019s \u201cHigher Love,\u201d a 1990 cover that gained traction well after Houston\u2019s death when Norwegian DJ Kygo remixed it last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The show is designed to be as close to the real thing as possible, Tudor said. But the technology still needs improving to truly obtain that goal; the holograms are two-dimensional, which severely limits the show\u2019s stage dynamics, and a particularly scrutinizing eye can still see an occasionally translucent holographic image from certain angles.<\/p>\n

But the show is peppered with small details to try and heighten a sense of realism. Producers have \u201cWhitney\u201d wear multiple detailed outfits, from a bright orange jumpsuit to a more frilly gold dress. Whitney\u2019s hologram looks wet when they pour rain on her, and there\u2019s the occasional virtual fan outburst yelling \u201cI love you Whitney!\u201d While a deceased artist\u2019s hologram could come across dystopian to some, Tudor said that done tastefully, he sees these hologram shows as homages.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a complicated mix of disciplines if you will,\u201d Tudor said. \u201cI could\u2019ve made Whitney fly around stage if I wanted to, but she didn\u2019t. One of the things that\u2019s really critical is we want to be authentic. To me, it\u2019s creepy and eerie if you make the artist do something they never would\u2019ve done. But if you are authentic and live within the rules of who they were, this is a celebration of her legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cGood evening, everyone, and welcome to Whitney Houston, very much live,\u201d a holographic Whitney tells a small crowd of reporters in Los Angeles during a dress rehearsal for the late singer\u2019s upcoming \u201cAn Evening With Whitney: The Whitney Houston Hologram Tour.\u201d While Houston has been dead for eight years, the creators behind the singer\u2019s hologram […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-804350","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-22 07:31:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}