2012 has been a crazy year in many ways, and the music industry hasn’t exactly been immune to its air of pervading insanity. (In fairness, the music industry is rarely immune to any sort of insanity, but still, humor us here.) This year has given us a particularly rich vein of memorable controversies, conflicts, and contretemps, and as part of our ongoing end-of-year wrap-up, we’re looking back at some of the most significant. Some of these are hilarious, some of them depressing, some of them hilariously depressing, and some just plain old bewildering — but from the resurrection of dead rappers through homeless people functioning as wifi hotspots to a record company suing an entire country, all of them have been worth remembering.
Tupac vs. mortality
Natalie Cole doing a duet with her dead father was creepy enough, but 2012 saw the raising-dead-artists-from-the-grave idea taken a step further when a hologram of Tupac Shakur was projected onto the stage at Coachella. The bizarre spectacle inspired lots of Internet excitement about the idea that hologram Tupac might go on tour, pondering about other dead artists who might be brought out of permanent retirement, plentiful hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing about the idea’s ethical implications… and, of course, the inevitable fake Twitter account. All the speculation over whether we’d see more hologram artists, however, was brought to a rather abrupt close by the news that the company responsible for the Coachella spectacle had filed for bankruptcy.
