Please, someone call the Fyre brigade
If you haven’t watched either of the two Fyre Festival documentaries yet, get it done, champ. Then read this piece of exquisite content whereby I have planned a UK version of the festival.
Truly, Fyre Festival is the gift that continues to give, especially now that the original presentation pitch has leaked online:
It’s chaos from start to finish, resembling a college presentation that you put together in twelve minutes right before the deadline, with the mindset of “Fuck it, if I fail, I fail”.
Rather than you having to scroll through 43 pages of what it just straight up impeccable comedy writing, I’ve read the entire thing for you. Hero? I guess.
What I’m now going to do is relay some of my personal highlights from the presentation, which was tricky to narrow down because please believe me when I say that it was all gold. From the confidentiality agreement right down to the use of the term ‘Fyre Squad’ for their personnel.
This is an unbiased review of the Fyre Festival PowerPoint presentation. If you’ve got any questions, please wait until the end. Thank you.
If you give a confidentiality agreement at the start of anything, it immediately gives off a vibe of professionalism. Dairylea Lunchables would be regarded as Michelin star level cuisine if there was a tiny slip of paper inside the wrapper that contained a confidentiality statement.
But once you read the Fyre Festival confidentiality spiel, it’s actually complete garbage, akin to that of a minimum word count shy A-level English essay.
“This Private Placement Memorandum does not constitute an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy in any jurisdiction in which such offer or solicitation would be unlawful or to any person to whom it is unlawful to make such offer or solicitation”.
I will personally give a crisp, clean, spicy £50 note to anyone that can make sense of this line, or even simply read it aloud without stuttering / losing the will to live halfway through.
The real kicker here is the fact that they’ve used the guy from Fuck Jerry, an organisation built on stealing jokes, as an example of an influencer. Furthermore, whomst is the elusive musician? Why, it’s a long-haired drummer of course. He/she must be very good. So good that they cannot be identified. The model is maybe a Hadid? A descendent of Tommy Hilfiger? Who cares.
It’s tricky to stop the images distracting you from the fact that the slide states “Since launching in May 2016, thousands of offers representing tens of millions of dollars of performances have been made and accepted with Fyre”. This is tremendously fun to think about when you remember that the absolute best acts they could secure for the festival was Blink 182, who later smelled a rat and pulled out. “Tens of millions of dollars” doesn’t even make sense. WHO WROTE THIS?
JESSE! JO! STARK! Should’ve led with that one, Fyre Festival. Snagging Jesse Jo Stark is huge!
Also very amusing that they’ve said “Fyre’s roster” as if they’re all going to be working shifts at the festival. Queen Latifah will be serving burgers out the side of a van. DJ Khaled is doing security and Jamie Foxx will be shouting “Keep it moving there please folks” as he looks after crowd control.
This is a fun snippet from the section where they explain how Fyre facilitates their booking services. “Day-to-day anagement” is a real peach of a typo, though. Remember that movie with Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler? ‘Anger Anagement’, that was great.
9 out of 43 pages in the presentation are about the actual business plan of Fyre. They’ve filled the rest with promo for the festival, which is delicious. “What if we reimagined what it means to attend a music festival”. Yes. Quite. But also, with full credit to the organisers, this is precisely what they have done, albeit very much unintentionally.
Prior to Fyre Festival, people expected to hear and see some live music at a music festival, maybe even use a bathroom or drink water that didn’t require dick-sucking to obtain. But now, we are hardened to the ways of the world. It turns out that music festivals can fail spectacularly and subsequently provide the perfect subject matter for two incredible documentaries. Also memes, heaps and heaps of glorious memes.
This is going to be so lit fam, we can’t even put it into words. Although here are three words that we have put it into. They’re buzzwords, the kind you hear at an excruciating three-hour meeting where the very first suggestion that was made ends up being the final choice, negating everything that was excruciatingly explained from that moment onwards.
IGNITE. ENERGY. POWER. All I am seeing is a teen setting his farts on fire, or Fyre if you will, which admittedly would’ve actually saved the festival.
The deck contains 4 (four) pages of the admittedly very cleverly named “Fyre Starters”, also known as influencers. Things get really interesting when you reach the fourth page, where the people, although seemingly popular on Instagram, may as well be taken straight out of a school yearbook from a random town in the US. They are made up people, I’m sure of it. Nobody knows these people:
Shout out to my boy Brandon Flowers, whose participation very blatantly came about after a misunderstanding regarding booking The Killers’ frontman.
To get your Fyre Starter name, simply take a non-primary colour and combine it with a type of car. I’m Cerise Almera and I’ve got 69k followers and 420 likes.
Whoever asked “Is Fyre Festival The New Coachella?”, please show yourself. I just want to talk. Same with the person who earnestly used the phrase ‘fomo-inducing’. Is everything alright at home? Are you getting enough water?
Also, a large amount of clout must ceremoniously be bestowed upon the person that said “Fyre Festival is not your typical festival experience”, because they were telling the absolute truth. Even though the festival hadn’t even happened at this stage, rendering almost all of the above quotes invalid, it was a very safe statement to make. I suspect that this person felt dubious about the whole thing, so provided a non-committed quote. Or, let’s be real, this is a funny coincidence because the quotes are all made up.
I cannot prove this, but I am precisely one thousand percent certain that the word ‘Ideate’ came from looking up ‘think’ in a thesaurus. ‘Think’ would’ve just sounded dumb, but ‘ideate’ is a much better word, especially since it sounds like a vitamin you’re supposed to take for some sort of brain concentration deficiency. Rewording the above slide in plain English, their plan is to have a think, think a bit more, then do some stuff probably. HOW did they get sponsors? How.
Ja Rule looks after “overall business strategy”, which we can safely deduce means “We just needed a big name, but failing that, we managed to snag Ja and sometimes he comes to meetings if there’s free pastries”.
When you’re listing your founder’s worldwide record sales in the section where evidence of their business acumen is supposed to go, that’s usually a red flag. Mad props to Ja for putting on a very convincing pose for the photograph, though. He’s even wearing a blazer. I believe his suitability for the role based off that alone.
They end the deck with an extremely thought-provoking quote, which they’ve actually attributed to the originator, something Fuck Jerry would’ve been likely to threaten to cut ties with them over.
“SEEK THOSE who LIGHT your FLAMES”. Do you get it? The festival is called Fyre. It’s almost as if they want attendees to torch the place, but in the end, it was the organisers who ended up torching themselves.
Godspeed, Fyre Festival. Thank you for the memes.
