‘It was an absolute Fyre Festival.’ Before Miami contestants were enlisted to save the world, another group signed up in Montreal. But where were the cameras?
Before this most recent edition of the popular music festival arrived, a curious set of facts surfaced.
“The last time that there was a major hip hop festival on the planet was in New Orleans,” rapper A$AP Rocky said of the festival that had taken place on May 9, 2012. “And that festival was not a rap festival, that festival was a R.E.D. festival.”
“I would say that there is a little too much Fyre right now,” he continued in a promotional video, which he then released, but which was removed after a backlash.
“I would put it in the top seven of the worst festivals ever,” he added.
But first and foremost, there is the question of where the cameras were.
The Fyre Festival was a promotional video game for the first-ever virtual reality experience, which sold just enough tickets to put the event on track to break even, according to people familiar with the situation. As the festival wrapped up, it became clear that there were no cameras, because the festival was a disaster, with hundreds of thousands of tickets and few people willing to pay.
The festival was a farce and the event organizers deserve a huge amount of credit for that. But why did they choose to put cameras in a venue that had once been a music venue?
One thing was clear: This was not about entertainment. It was about promoting the festival as a whole and creating a spectacle for the world’s media to look at.
According to those close to the situation, the festival was marketed as the “World’s Worst Festival Ever.”
It was the first festival where people paid thousands of dollars for a chance to see a group of superstars perform before millions of people live, where hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised to fund the event and where people were given fake tickets by the festival organizers, which, when they sold out, were then reported as fake when the event was