KISSing mortality goodbye?

By STEVE MASCORD

AT midnight on Saturday, revellers in various states of inebriation were fanning out across Manhattan and beyond after witnessing the final show of rock culture behemoths KISS.

Among the final words on stage of frontman Paul Stanley, 71, as confetti blanketed Madison Square Garden during “Rock N Roll All Nite”, were “the end of this road is the start of a new road”.

It may have sounded like a glib line from a Netflix time travel series but as an animated version of the band performed “God Gave Rock’n’Roll To You II” on the big screen, a QR code hologram hung in the air above the dispersing crowd.

Scanning it sent fans to a countdown and sign-up page. I was at Stuyvesant Square on the long walk back to the East Village, having just accepted a crab rangoon from a restaurant worker on her way home from work with leftovers, when the countdown hit zero.

The announcement was, if nothing else, intriguing. 

Stanley, bassist Gene Simmons, guitarist Tommy Thayer and drummer Eric Singer has been scanned by the George Lucas-founded Hollywood special effects firm Industrial Light And Magic. This is a process where they have dots (aside from Simmons who was in full make-up) painted on their bodies and faces and a computer ‘learns’ their movements using artificial intelligence. KISS had been ‘immortalised’, it was claimed: turned into a demon who could breath fire without the need for circus props, a Starchild who could leap 10 metres into the air instead of two, a spaceman with the power of flight and a cat who can indeed climb walls.

These avatars would then be leveraged by Pophouse, a Swedish firm co-founded by ABBA’s  Björn Ulvaeus and responsible for the London-based Abba Voyage installation, a show which sees virtual versions of Bjorn’s influential seventies pop group perform before a live audience.

It was not immediately clear if Pophouse had acquired KISS’s music catalogue, estimated to have been responsible for 100 million album sales.

Being present for KISS’ last show was a way of making 14-year-old me proud, I guess. KISS, America and Madison Square Garden were at that age unreachable symbols of glamour, wealth, exoticism and success. Together they were the sun in whose orbit I existed from Australian suburbia.

I have to accept – if my overwhelming sense of relief upon my ticket being scanned on Saturday is any evidence – that at some visceral level I believed my being there for the intersection and conclusion of these touchstones would confer upon me permanent validation of my own life and the course it has taken. I had reached a personal finish line at the weekend, breaking a ribbon made of fate.

But I’m not just in America to see KISS.

On December 27, 2022, my best friend went to sleep in New Orleans and never woke up. He suffered a massive heart attack, leaving a group chat with friends on three continents with his plans for the following day. I am going to travel to Louisiana and do those things on December 28. Because I was in Newcastle (Australia) on New Years Eve when the news came through – and maybe because his messages are still there in the chat group – I still haven’t completely accepted Jim’s death.

So, the intersection of the digital world and the mortal coil was already dominating my thoughts.

In news York and Orleans, I hoped to gain a deeper understanding of finality and mortality and learn how to go on living when the people and things you love have died.

At midnight, KISS kind of ruined that.

What if we could all afford to be scanned by Industrial Light and Magic? What if Jim had stood in a studio with dots on his face, telling bad jokes and drinking Yuengling, until there was an avatar of him? 

In the early days of portrait painting, photography and motion pictures, it was mostly notable people who were depicted. This process of mapping someone’s movements, of recording their voices and synthesising their intellect and personality, is currently at the same point as a black hood over the photographer and an exploding flash. In Futurama, the heads in jars are mainly those of famous people.

If you were to tape hours of conversations with your loved ones and film them from all angles, could we in two centuries have WhatsApp groups that include our distant ancestors? And could AI versions of our ancestors speak to each other in the digital realm … and would that be meaningful and valuable if no-one corporeal was involved? 

Could Jim continue to be involved in our Wattsapp group? When I go “out to the Battle Of New Orleans battle site” and have “a few drinks in Chalmette and then Arabi” on December 28, could I tell Jim about it and send him a few photos and have him respond? And would that be real? What IS real?

Will everyone born today, in some sense, live forever like the Starchild, the Demon, the Spaceman and the Catman?

I came to America to make peace with mortality. Instead, I find myself flirting with its opposite.