Celebrities like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid advertised the Fyre Festival as a swanky, luxurious hybrid of concerts and a tropical vacation. Now, the festival is cancelled – and thousands of partygoers are stuck on an island, in airports or a tent city, asking the U.S. Embassy in the Bahamas to help get them home.
Ja Rule’s team created the event, where he was scheduled to perform. Blink-182, a nineties-kid favorite, was slated to perform as well but pulled out when the disaster became apparent.
Just how bad was this festival?
Fyre’s website initially said, “Guests will be staying in modern, eco-friendly, geodesic domes.” In reality, they were ushered into leftover USAid tents. The twenty- and thirty-somethings on the trip paid at least $1,000, and sometimes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, for the experience. Instead of chef-designed and catered meals, attendees were served boxed meals in which the star player was a cheese sandwich.
Twitter lit up with jokes about the rich kids of Instagram being forced to fend for themselves – but this “festival” will go down in history not as just an apocalyptic attempt at a party, but as an international branding crisis. The Bahamian Ministry of Tourism had been working with Fyre Media in the hopes of bringing more Millennials – and their tourism dollars – to their country.
Vanity Fair reports, “Bahamian officials coordinated closely with the organizers…The many businesses involved are depending on Fyre’s ability to deliver.”
The extent of the damage to the United States’ reputation in the Bahamas is thus far unknown.
Fyre maintains that the chaos was an “unforeseeable situation” caused by “circumstances out of [their] control.” A former festival employee is singing a different tune: Chloe Gordon, who worked as a talent producer, claims that Fyre wasn’t paying its performers on time. What’s more, she alleges that Ja Rule’s team knew in advance that they were heading for disaster, and went forward anyway. Gordon quit her job six weeks before Fyre Festival went up in flames.
The Bahamian Ministry of Tourism released a statement distancing itself from Fyre Media. The government is even doing damage control for its national brand:
Concertgoers are joining a class action lawsuit lead by Mark Geragos, Hollywood lawyer who has represented Chris Brown, Winona Ryder, and Michael Jackson. The $100 million lawsuit alleges that Ja Rule knew the event was headed for disaster lied about it to the attendees.
This Millennial Mega-Meltdown has caused shockwaves in the music community, and the international diplomatic sphere, too.
