The certainty of death, hip-hop style In the heat and the cold of the California desert, revellers at the Coachella music festival were silenced last week when headline acts such as Radiohead were upstaged by the rapper Tupac Shakur. Unannounced, the controversial hip-hop artist, who has sold more than 75m albums, joined Snoop Dog and Dr Dre on stage to perform two brand-new tracks. That would be the same Tupac Shakur who was killed in a drive-by shooting 15 years ago. The magic trick came courtesy of a state-of-the-art illusion developed by a consortium of visual effects companies. It was not the first time that a technically rendered apparition has taken to the stage at a concert. Nonetheless, Tupac-from-the-dead was one of those moments that makes gravestones of previous milestones. The Wall Street Journal reported that the virtual performer was being lined up for a possible stadium tour. Other media debated the repercussions for what was once referred to as live music. Would some of us finally be able to trip out at a Jimi Hendrix gig? Or watch him jam with John Lennon? Whatever happens, expect dead rappers such as Tupac to tour first. Because if commerce was destined to conquer mortality, then the hip-hop industry was destined to be the sub-sector to deliver resurrection. This is not because of the genre's violent death rate, or the honouring of fallen comrades with its very own take on the libation ritual. Hip-hop is the most business-besotted movement in the history of youth culture and, as everyone in this world and the next one knows, business leads to innovation. Hip-hop's entrepreneurial roster stretches from giants with global business empires, such as Russell Simmons, P Diddy and Jay-Z, to the wannabes beneath them who act as if lending their name to a clothing range makes them Steve Jobs. The rapper 50 Cent has penned his own business book, though he put things more succinctly with the title of his debut album: Get Rich Or Die Tryin. A subculture that worships materialism was perhaps bound to materialise the immaterial. More tellingly, though, technological innovation was a hallmark of a more humble hip-hop scene long before big beats became big business. From the start, it was as much about pushing the technical boundaries of the turntable, the synthesiser, the drum machine and the sampler. When traditional sound engineers initially refused to work in the red-hued distortion zones of sound meters, the stage was set for producers like Dr Dre to attain the same stature as performing artists. In his book, Hip Hop America, the cultural critic Nelson George recalls: "A whole generation of young males have been turned on to electronics through working DJ equipment." He even credits the movement's drug dealers with popularising the pager. The tech-savvy fan base partly explains why the genre has been the hardest hit by internet music piracy. The visual effect on the Coachella stage - widely but wrongly labelled a hologram - was animated from scratch rather than built from footage and sound recordings. Given the audience's love for and faith in technology, the feat was no less revered for not being real. However, the willingness of fans to embrace a "hologram" reflects more than just comfort with technology. It illustrates a less rigid interface between technology, life and death. Social media have simultaneously cemented human relationships and made them more ephemeral. Disembodied cyber-buddies cease to exist the moment you "unfriend" or "unfollow" them. Meanwhile, in the modern necropolis of online memorial sites, it is not uncommon for the bereft to keep their loved ones" Facebook pages alive. The absence of any furore over last week's stunt contrasts with previous uproars over the posthumous use of Kurt Cobain's image. Likewise, the remaining members of The Beatles ignited controversy in 1995 by releasing a new single using demos recorded by Lennon. But after being "excavated" for no fewer than eight posthumous albums, Tupac's memory was hardly consecrated ground. Posthumous hits made from demos and prematurely halted works-in-progress are not a giant existential leap from the staple hip-hop technique of sampling and scratching old records. Sampling has provided a potent way for artists to stay connected with those who have gone before - particularly those from forerunning genres such as funk and soul. As George notes: "[When] previous recordings are [the] primary tools of composition . . . it changes the relationship of the past to the present." But sampling doesn't just pay homage to the dead - it reinvents them and the musical legacy they left. And let's face it: it is easier to hero-worship a hologram. Despite his genuine creative genius, the real Tupac was notorious for being, well, notorious. It would take a pretty twisted mind to have the hologram mimic him to the point of being convicted for groping a fan. Insofar as the new Tupac provides a less risky brand ambassador, it illustrates how technology has always helped humans to refashion the deceased into what we want them to be. From the phonogram to the videocam to the hologram, advances in audio-visual media have altered the mechanics of mourning as well as those of entertainment. At Coachella, they did both. The writer is an FT journalist and author of the novel Londonstani