ME: What about a Coachella where you could die?
JA RULE: Go on.— Volcel Proust (@Ugarles) April 28, 2017
Seems like nobody can resist the chance to mock a bunch of mostly-young Rich Snowflakes suffering — for once — some penalties for being over-privileged and under-smart…
… Fyre Festival was supposed to be an elite and luxurious musical festival. Hosted on a private island in the Bahamas — which was once owned by Pablo Escobar — tickets ranged into the thousands, and the promo videos for the event, which was co-organized by Ja Rule, featured Bella Hadid and other professionally hot people frolicking on sandy beaches and diving into pristine waters. Except, when the people who actually ponied up those dollars showed up to the event this week, Fyre did not deliver. The site was unfinished, headliner Blink-182 had canceled, and the luxurious villas festivalgoers were promised turned out to be nothing more than disaster-relief shelters…
So happy our plane never took off. We were about 5 minutes from joining "Lord of the Fyre Flies: Ja Rule's Revenge." #FyreFestival
— Jeremy Burke (@JEREMYBURKE) April 28, 2017
NYMag also had the single best summary of why things went so wrong…
In early March, a friend of mine texted me to ask if I wanted to be a talent producer for the Fyre Festival. I’d never heard of it, but the gig involved going to the Bahamas and being paid extremely well. So I said yes and packed my bags. The festival was supposed to be a luxury music retreat where elite millennials could mingle with “influencers” and models. Tickets cost between $1K and $125K, gourmet food and accommodations were promised. I was planning to spend the next two months working on the festival, but a mere four days after I arrived I was back on a plane to New York…
On March 14, I flew from Miami to the island of Great Exuma to get the planning started. I was excited, at least at first. Flying in, the water looked beautiful — but I was almost immediately warned not to go near it because of a rampant shark problem. That was an omen I regrettably missed…
My job as a talent producer was to coordinate travel and on-site logistics with the artists who would be performing: Blink 182, Major Lazer, Disclosure, among others, had already signed on. I would be working with an 11-person team and a few of the festival executives. The production team was all new hires and, before we arrived, we were led to believe things had been in motion for a while. But nothing had been done. Festival vendors weren’t in place, no stage had been rented, transportation had not been arranged. Frankly, we were standing on an empty gravel pit and no one had any idea how we were going to build a festival village from scratch.
Pending disaster aside, I started working from an island rental house. I contacted the booked artists’ tour managers to start to coordinate. Almost all of them had the same question for me, which was along the lines of, “Hey … Where’s our money??” I tried to email the business manager to get an answer, who said something like “stand by” for three days in a row. By the end of the week it became clear they would not pay the people they owed…
He dropped out of Bucknell to to create an elite millennial-targeted credit card that didn't give you any of the rewards promised, so.
— Tyler Dinucci (@nuccbko) April 28, 2017
Didn’t take the media long to track down the bro responsible. Per the Washington Post:
… Long before he was forced to apologize for his now notorious Fyre Festival, entrepreneur Billy McFarland founded another company in 2013 called Magnises that made some familiar-sounding promises targeting status-seeking millennials.
For an annual membership fee of about $250, Magnises members could “unlock their cities and take their lives to the next level.” They were assured exclusive tickets to “private members-only concerts, tastings with notable chefs, and exclusive art previews at top galleries,” as well as access to hard-to-book Broadway shows (including “Hamilton”) and events such as New York Fashion Week.
But some of those benefits never materialized or were far from what was advertised, according to a report earlier this year by Business Insider…
… McFarland… despite describing Friday as “definitely the toughest day of my life,” was already vowing to forge ahead and hold the event in the future. Perhaps it was his history of moving on from failure. (In 2011, McFarland co-founded a social networking site called Spling, which attracted $400,000 in funding but now appears defunct.) Or his habit of overpromising.
What was clear was that, at least in McFarland’s mind, the Fyre Festival was not dead…
#FyreFestival organizer Billy McFarland explains, in his own words, how things went so horribly wrong https://t.co/m0nSrOKWqF pic.twitter.com/VSGeTGPdGE
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) April 28, 2017
So the Trump Administration has not yet cornered the market in ‘Eminently Punchable Faces’…
Keith P.
I need a front man for my new band “Douchey McDoucheface” and that guy is him.
Major Major Major Major
This whole thing made me soooo happy to read about.
Bruuuuce
Via C&L, just saw the cold open for Not the WH Correspondents’ Dinner, featuring the return of CJ Cregg. *swoon*
Bjacques
At Altamont, at least the bands showed up. Ditto Willie Nelson’s 4th Of July Picnic 1975, an object lesson in never giving rednecks drugs. (The 1976 one, OTOH, went off without a hitch, and was considered the best. I was at both, because my stepdad was doing a documentary on country music legend Floyd Tillman.)
NotMax
Millennials in a nutshell.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: You really think Millennials have $12,000 to shell out and would do it for a Blink-182 concert?
SRW1
That McFarland guy’s got all the talent to be President when it’s the turn of the millenials.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
More the hollowness of the project and roster of snafus than the attendees.
Never heard of Blink-182. Sounds like a Krofft kids’ program knock-off.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: They were a big “pop punk” band when this millennial was 15.
ruemara
Why does this analysis remind me of the saying, “Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man”?
Major Major Major Major
@ruemara: That’s been going around lately…
Elizabelle
I’m all ears for any news about the Fyre Festival. It’s incompetence and grandeur in an amusing format, and no one got killed. Does make me wonder, though —
(1) sounds like it rose to the level of fraud. TechBro Billy McFarland might find himself being called “defendant” more often than “entrepreneur” in future articles.
(2) that the [non]-organizers got so far with this — were they kind of canny in choosing to hold their Hellfest in the Bahamas? Which does have a Ministry of Tourism that kind of got involved at the end, but an island that depends on visitors and outside money for its economy? Thus, they did not shut down this fraud of a festival a lot sooner.
Amazing you could have thousands of people descending on a concert site that did not have the rudimentary basics in place. How much permitting and oversight does the Bahamas do? Maybe not a lot, and maybe the [non]-organizers knew that.
Le Compte/Botsplainer put up a tweet yesterday that still makes me laugh.
Ja Rule might come out of this a pirate hero.
sm*t cl*de
So there was never any actual plan to pay the bands, or arrange the gourmet cuisine, or provide accommodation. There was no “private island”. Professional festival organisers were called in but not paid so they went away again.
Why didn’t they just brand it “Trump Festival”?
kd bart
At least the Baby Boomers were able to pull off Woodstock.
hellslittlestangel
Billy McFarland is like the son Trump never had.
MattF
@hellslittlestangel: When is Billy running for President?
Elizabelle
@hellslittlestangel: Yeah. Look out Tiffany. Have I got an arranged marriage for you.
Baud
Old news. The buzz is now about Baud!Fest! 2018!
Elizabelle
@MattF: Good morning there.
Yeah. Lot of learning out of this concert debacle, but it’s startling how effective paid “influencers” can be. One of the shrewdest things Fyre TechBros did was paying about 400 social media influencers for PR. Another triumph of marketing over product. Fyre’s product did not yet exist, and still does not.
Wired magazine: The Fyre Festival: The Fiasco We All Should Have Seen Coming
Elizabelle
@Baud: You’re up early.
Last night BCN time, at 5:33 a, I was still being treated to the neighbors on other side of wall strumming a guitar and singing American pop songs. For a few verses. Goyte, Nirvana (acoustic, thank dog), I forget what else but it was recognizable. Party going on. They finally shut down and exited about ten to six.
Betty Cracker
@kd bart: True, but if we’re to judge a generational cohort by its rich, feckless dilettantes, Donald J. Trump is the ur-Boomer. Doesn’t seem fair to the rest of them.
Baud
@Elizabelle: My dog got me up early.
opiejeanne
@Elizabelle: That’s not the way to do it. You always invite the neighbors when you throw a party that will be noisy and then you quiet down not long after midnight, especially if you share a wall with anyone.
MattF
@Elizabelle: But, for the record, the headline on the Wired story is sort of click-bait. One wonders, after all, what should we have known? And when should we have known it? Any instance of the word ‘curated’ is a giveaway, but besides doing a comprehensive background investigation of anyone who wants to be paid, I don’t see an easy way out.
opiejeanne
@Baud: It’s nearly 3am here, and I’m not asleep yet. Well, I was for a few minutes but something woke me up and now I’m awake again.
Elizabelle
@Baud: You’ve got a dog? Lucky.
That Wired link touches on dogs — and who does not remember this New Yorker cartoon?
So is the dog or baud taking early morning duties?
Mel
Exuma. Eczema!?
How fitting that this garbage-Fyre fiasco took place on an island whose phonetic pronunciation
sounds suspiciously like a miserably itchy and difficult to treat skin condition.
opiejeanne
@Betty Cracker: Thanks. Every generation has some assholes who rise to extreme peaks of assholeness.
We were the right age to be at Woodstock and that was our music but we were busy with jobs and learning to adult, we lived on the other side of the country, and we didn’t hear about it until after it was all over. It sounded like we would have been miserable.
Baud
@opiejeanne: I hate when that happens.
@Elizabelle: Two. When you see an intelligent comment by me, it’s one of them.
Elizabelle
@MattF: The Fyre youtube ad was clearly fantasy. Obviously models, people. Same marketing approach as for fine watches, perfume, luxury goods.
I especially love the shot of anorexic young women running towards the viewer. Yeah, that happens in real life. But it seems to have worked.
A millennial woman’s boot descending the stair of a private jet. A millennial piloting an aircraft. Blue, blue water.
What’s funny, in retrospect, is the footage of an airplane wreck in the that blue water. Appears twice. Suckers!
MattF
@Elizabelle: Amazing. ‘Once owned by a famously homicidal drug lord and narco-terrorist’. Leaves one breathless with anticipation.
Applejinx
@kd bart: Read up on ‘Food For Love’ and John Roberts, the rich Boomer whose inheritance funded the ‘free festival’. If the rich people behind Fyre Festival had seen fit to blow their entire inheritances on paying the musicians and promoters, and most notably if the Fyre people had the sense to hire just enough really competent organizers and techs, they might have pulled off a similar ‘victory’. Roberts did manage to get out of debt again: took him until 1980. He died in 2001, age 56.
That’s the trouble with the bored rich today: not enough John Robertses, too many Michael Langs. They cannot imagine anything to do that’s worth more than just hanging onto their money as it compounds itself, so even when they try to do something like Fyre they try to do it on the cheap and it implodes ludicrously. The Bob Spitz book ‘Barefoot in Babylon’ is pretty exceptional at documenting both the rip-off of Woodstock, and also the key players who were expensive and talented and pulled off the Woodstock infrastructure, without which it would have collapsed no matter how much money was on tap. There was a key guy whose talent was finding other key guys and convincing them to sign on…
In politics, probably the only rich person willing to blow stupid money (and not on the cheap) just to see if something could be pulled off, is Vladimir Putin. Nobody in American politics did likewise, including Bernie and Trump. Trump wouldn’t have won if Putin had not been happy to piss away a bunch of money on a lost cause that shouldn’t have worked…
sm*t cl*de
@Elizabelle:
the footage of an airplane wreck in the that blue water. Appears twice.
Stock footage. Why would grifters waste money on fresh content when the models-on-beach footage is already out there?
prob50
@hellslittlestangel:
Donald would have found someone to blame for all the problems and Fyred him.
evodevo
@opiejeanne: Yeah, same here …a few hours of rock would have been fine, but 3 days of rain, mud, living in a tent ( or nothing) and having no food doesn’t sound like fun My husband wouldn’t have minded, but I certainly would….
efgoldman
Why do I get the impression that a Venn diagram of the suckers who actually paid money and/or showed up, and the unreconstructed wilmerbots, would be almost congruent….
NorthLeft12
Further proof, as if any was needed, that the rich are as stupid and gullible as the general public.
Of course, they can afford to be stupid and gullible, general public? Not so much.
Paul in KY
@Major Major Major Major: They are still big. Slightly different line up now.
efgoldman
@NorthLeft12:
Can you say “Bernie Madoff” boys and girls? Of course you can.
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: You better call Ja Rule if you really want to muck it up right.
Elizabelle
@efgoldman: Yup. I was thinking Bernie Madoff too.
efgoldman
@Elizabelle:
And his fraud went on for decades, to the extent, if my memory is correct, that he sort of believed it himself.
Johannes
Whaddaya expect from a team that can’t spell “fire”?/Statler & Waldorf
prob50
@efgoldman:
I’m not sure that’s possible, in that he was soliciting investments but not actually investing the funds. He may have somehow convinced himself that it was OK to do that, but I don’t see how he could have believed those funds would actually make an actual real profit for his clients. Ponzi operators will initially pay some clients to gain word-of-mouth credibility.
Lurking Canadian
@Elizabelle: That ad was so weird. It was more like a beer commercial than anything else. I am not a marketing expert, but unless I was trying to attract an all-male, all-douchebag clientele, I would not use an ad that is 90% shots of women in bikinis.
MattF
@Elizabelle: Ah… affinity fraud. “What group can I appeal to that identifies with assholes like me?”
prob50
@Lurking Canadian:
I think the all-male-douchebager’s were probably a significant segment of his marketing target.
hueyplong
If only the Russian election rigging were this easily and quickly solved.
This might point out the problem with having Republicans in charge of determining whether they were traitors.
SFAW
@hellslittlestangel:
I was thinking that McFarland would be a top pick for Shitgibbon’s Adminstration — Secretary of Grift? Chief of Shaft? Director of Home-Scam Insecurity? — and I realized that being Shitgibbon’s scion would not prevent that.
And, by the way: how do you KNOW that he’s not Shitgibbon’s son? To hear Shitgibbon tell it, he’s slept with more women than Wilt Chamberlain did, and I doubt he denied them his “essence.”
I bet there’s grant money out there for determining whether being a grifting asshole is genetic or environmental.
Splitting Image
@efgoldman:
I’m not so sure about that. The festival-goers seem to realize they’ve been had.
Elizabelle
@Lurking Canadian:
LOL. Although the
fashion modelsinstagram influencers were all over Elle magazine in December, early PR for the Hellfest. And they are so skinny as to be hunger victims.Elle: How Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and More Models Vacation in the Bahamas Together
Bikinis, jet skis, and private planes.
So there’s a contingent of women that might want to be skinny, skinny models/social influencers themselves.
From Elle:
Because it has virtually no effing infrastructure, dear readers!
The rest is skinny model porn. Don’t you wish you were there?
Patricia Kayden
@Elizabelle: LOL. This just shows how gullible some people are to the allure of beautiful women. It’s almost like mythology come to life with real sirens drawing wealthy young men to part with their $$$ and common sense.
LurkerNoLonger
@Keith P.: That guy puts the fuck in clusterfuck.
SFAW
@Splitting Image:
You Bernie-haters, I swear. If Bernie weren’t the second-most-important voice in the Democrat Party, then why would he be going around the country, talking about how the Democrat Party is the flag to which all Americans should rally? (Apologies for possible mixed metaphors.)
Elizabelle
@Patricia Kayden: Real life sirens. You called it!
Tim C.
Beginning mild rant:
Can we stop picking on “millennials.” Categorizing and comparing any generation by what the middle-aged misremember as being different from their own youth is a vapid and shallow exercise. The fact that there is a cluster of human beings who are young, rich, and practice poor decision-making goes back to the dawn of civilization. These people are suckers, but there have always been suckers.
Peale
@Tim C.: no. And when you get to be my age, you can pick on whatever media consultants have come up with as a name for the under thirties.
Julia Grey
Hahaha!
Julia Grey
@SFAW:
It’s the DemocratIC party. When Republucans talk about it they elide the “ic” as you did in order to downplay the adjectival concept. They’re saying, in effect, that the Democratic Party is not in fact democratic. Is that what you meant, as well?
amk
so, entertainment for ‘elite few’ turned out to be an entertainment for masses?
Tripod
Never go to a musical festival where you can’t get off of the boat. Captive audiences exist to extract maximum $$ – and if the organizers fuck up and don’t have enough water, or security (or whatever) you’re SOL.
Tim C.
@Tripod: Double that if it’s not an established, well-known company. Disney might be expensive for example, but they are a known quantity. Ja Rule and “some dude” are not an established thing.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Julia Grey:
I read SFAW’s comment as snark, but I’ve been wrong a lot lately.
SFAW
@Steeplejack (phone):
Congratulations! You win! Glad I could help you “bend the curve.” (Although, I confess, I haven’t noticed you being wrong in the past.)
SFAW
@Julia Grey:
It was a joke. I’ve heard/read a number of reports that Bernie is still on his “the Dem leadership is corrupt” hobby horse. Maybe those are in the minority, but I tend to doubt it.
Elizabelle
@amk: LOL. True. A good way to look at it.
Villago Delenda Est
All a scam. The organizers should be hunted down and strung up.
Mnemosyne
@SFAW:
Hmm. Not your best work. I give it a 6 out of 10.
Steeplejack
@SFAW:
Well, the other night I defended someone’s comment as snark, and practically the very next comment after mine was that person doubling down in decidedly non-snarky and very serious terms. Live and learn.
Uncle Cosmo
@Mel: Damn you to heck, Mel. I thought the same thing.
What’s the next sandbar over from Great Eczema named, Grand Mal? Mohr Caubel?
West of the Rockies (been a while)
McFarland is clearly a knucklehead. This Ja Rule person though is every bit as culpable, yes? Where is the picture of his grinning, douchey face? He seems to be skating.
SFAW
@Mnemosyne:
OK, now I’m hurt.
SFAW
@Steeplejack:
Sorry to hear that. Poe’s Law in action?
Although I’m not as “popular” (so to speak) as Baud, MajorX4, efgoldman, for example, I thought I was a known quantity vis-a-vis my not-a-BernieBro status. Oh well.
Perhaps less arrogance/smugness is in order. Aaah — who am I kidding? I’ll be an asshole until Alzheimer’s takes me.
Steeplejack (phone)
@SFAW:
I think the election dropped the collective IQ on this blog about 20 points. People were stunned and are still adapting and still uncertain about a lot of stuff, including how to interpret (certain) comments.
Oh, yeah, and people seem touchier and quicker to take offense.
SFAW
@Steeplejack (phone):
I was tempted to respond with a hearty “FUCK YOU!!” but thought you might think I was serious..
On the other hand, the collective IQ here could drop by 60 points, and we’d still have 10 or 20 points on Shitgibbon. (I originally wrote “on the plus side,” but realized that having a Moron-in-Chief is hardly a plus.)
prob50
@SFAW:
And then we’d all be what…Sean Spicer???
Mel
@Uncle Cosmo: Both of those are listed in the travel brochure. I hear that there’s a fabulous afternoon outung package that starts with shark-dodging in Blepharitis Bay, followed by a picnic lunch on Grand Mal, and ending with a competitive running of anorexic models, Derby style, on the beach near the Strait of Scrofulus. Fancy hats and cravats mandatory!
Steeplejack (phone)
@SFAW:
Yeah, that would be the one that I would not see as snark.
Bitter Scribe
@Elizabelle: AFAIK, if you’re paid to post something, under FTC regs you have to disclose that.