Think of the worst idea of your life. Think of a time when you messed up so comprehensively, so spectacularly, that you alienated friends, angered strangers and permanently cratered your entire reputation. It might have felt bad at the time. Maybe you never even fully recovered. But, please, console yourself with this: whatever that idea was, at least it wasn’t as bad as staging a sequel to the Fyre festival.
Of course, you know all about the Fyre festival. A 2017 Bahamian festival, expressly designed to appeal to influencers and promising untold luxury, it ended in absolute disaster. Held in a remote parking lot, the festival’s musical acts pulled out, the prepaid RFID payment system didn’t work because of poor wifi, the accommodation was downgraded to disaster relief tents containing mattresses that got soaked in a downpour, and the promised “gourmet food” turned out to be a cheese sandwich in a foam box. And, if you saw the Fyre festival documentary, you’ll know that things got so bad that at one point its organiser, Billy McFarland, asked a gay employee to perform oral sex on a supplier so that ticket holders could drink water. In short, it was a historically bad idea, and should never be repeated.
But try telling that to Billy McFarland. He might have spent time in jail owing to the sheer amount of criminal negligence that went into the Fyre festival, but that hasn’t stopped McFarland from announcing Fyre festival 2. In a recent social media announcement, McFarland announced that a new Fyre festival would take place at the end of next year, that he came up with a 50-page outline for it inspired by his time spent in solitary confinement, and that the first batch of tickets had already sold out.
This time around, McFarland swears that he’s doing things by the book. Ticket sales are to be held in escrow until the festival is officially announced, plus McFarland promises that he’s working with “the best logistical and infrastructure partners” this time, to prevent anything like the last time from happening.
And, well, there’s just a lot to unpack here, isn’t there? The first question on everybody’s mind should be “Is this really happening?” And that’s a good question, because Billy McFarland hasn’t really done a good job of convincing people that he is a man who can ever be trusted with anything at all. Six years ago he promised people the experience of their lives, then failed to follow through so completely that he was literally jailed for fraud. And now he’s offering people the exact same thing again. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it would be a miracle if Fyre festival 2 even got as far as Fyre festival 1.
Perhaps it is real, though. Perhaps McFarland really does want to stage another Fyre festival, purely because he wants to erase all the horrors of the original. Perhaps his goal is to finally deliver on his 2017 promise: to charge vast amounts of money so that influencers can spend a weekend in the lap of luxury, attending an immersive music festival so ostentatious that it shifts the paradigm of what the genre can be. Perhaps people would forgive him, then. Perhaps he’d be hailed as a hero.
The big problem here, though, is that who on earth would want to pay good money to attend a Fyre festival, knowing that the brand is best associated with Korean Jamboree-level disaster? Imagine the terror you’d experience on the flight over, not knowing where you’d be staying or even if there was enough food. Imagine fretting that all the entertainment would pull out, and you’d struggle to find alternative accommodation. Imagine not knowing, every time you reached out for a sip of water, if a penis had been sucked to secure it.
So maybe McFarland is after a different audience this time. After all, the logical demographic would be obnoxiously ironic disaster tourists; the sort of people who watched the Fyre festival documentary and thought it would be hilarious if they could also spend a weekend being defrauded of all their money while in a state of high physical danger. Think of the LOLs. Think of the banter. Think of the future career as a talking head on all the inevitable Fyre festival 2 documentaries.
As such, Billy McFarland faces one hell of a tightrope walk. If Fyre festival 2 is a deliberate embrace of the shambolic original, he’ll never be taken seriously again. But if it’s actually nice, then that’s not Fyre festival, is it? Who’d watch a Netflix documentary about a competently staged music festival? Yuck.
