By Nolan Feeney
An artist’s legacy is no longer measured by album sales, posthumous releases or fan pilgrimages to childhood homes — it’s whether or not the deceased performer is resurrected in hologram form.
Two years after the Coachella music festival featured a three-dimensional light display of Tupac Shakur, a ghostly hologram of Michael Jackson took the stage at Sunday night’s Billboard Music Awards to perform “Slave to the Rhythm,” a track off his recent posthumous release, Xscape.
Though producer Timbaland’s fingerprints are all over the song’s contemporary remix, the Michael Jackson hologram was clearly programmed to be a classic crowd-pleaser — just watch him moonwalk like it’s 1983 all over again.
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Write to Nolan Feeney at nolan.feeney@time.com