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By David Farrell
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DF
Sidhu Moose Wala
The late Punjabi music superstar returns to the stage at Toronto's Scotiabank Arena tonight (Oct. 9) as a hologram, continuing the lasting legacy he left behind in 2022. The rapper's father Balkaur Singh spoke to Billboard India about the Signed to God tour.
Four years after his untimely death, Sidhu Moose Wala's legacy will carry on onstage.
The Punjabi music superstar's hologram tour at Toronto's Scotiabank Arena starts tonight (Oct. 9) for the first concert of his Signed to God world tour, the first time the technology has been used to bring a Punjabi artist onstage. Through a series of 3D projections, the rapper will take the stage for the first time since he was tragically gunned down in Moosa, Punjab in May 2022.
While hologram concerts have famously served to revive music legends' presence onstage, such as 2Pac at Coachella in 2012 or Michael Jackson during the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, Moose Wala, who was based in Brampton, Ontario, for some of the formative years of his career, had already considered the technology as a means to reach bigger audiences worldwide while he was still alive.
“Even before his death, Sidhu’s popularity had grown to such an extent that he was thinking about how he could reach an even larger audience. He had started discussing concerts where he wouldn’t necessarily have to be physically present, and that was when the idea of using hologram technology began to take shape,” the rapper's father Balkaur Singh tells Billboard India.
Toronto will host the premiere of the music video for the rapper's 2021 track "295," one of his signature hits which entered the Billboard Canadian Hot 100, became his sole Billboard Global 200 entry and currently boasts over 300 million Spotify streams. Moose Wala's family and estate have been using body doubles to bring the vision behind his tracks to life in posthumous music videos, be it for existing songs that never received the video treatment or unreleased tracks that were finalized during his lifetime.
Despite artificial intelligence being a means for creating new music, his family have opted to stick with the material they already have, as they prefer to honour the version of Sidhu who touched an entire generation with his craft, rather than manufacturing a new one, as explained by Singh.
“We have lived 28 years of our lives with Sidhu. We know what he was passionate about, what kind of music he wanted to make and what he believed in,” he says. “We cannot know exactly what choices he would have made today, but we try to stay as close as possible to what we know of him. We don’t want to create a Sidhu who is far removed from the person he actually was.”
That version of Sidhu made a lasting impact and left behind loads of music that has thriven, charted and even broken records. Moose Wala was a strong precursor of the Punjabi Wave, and his Moosetape became the highest-charting Punjabi album in Canada (No. 33) at the time it impacted the Billboard Canadian Albums chart in 2022. His presence on the charts hasn't waned over the years, with tracks like "Barota" and "Lock" landing on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100 in 2025, three years after his demise. His influence has been recognized by global stars and Canadian artists like Drake, NAV, Burna Boy and AP Dhillon, who have all publicly paid tribute to the Punjabi musician.
After kicking off in Toronto, the Signed to God tour will continue in Canada at Vancouver's Rogers Arena (Oct. 15) and Calgary's Scotiabank Saddledome (Oct. 19), before heading to the U.S. The estate has already announced plans for additional shows in the U.K., India, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates, per the tour's website.
