Ok, I just finished watching the documentary about the Fyre Festival on Netflix. It was called the greatest party that never happened. If you haven’t watched it, I highly encourage you to. Because OMG, how does this happen?
The Fyre Festival was headed by Ja Rule and Billy McFarland and it was promised to be this amazing luxury music festival in the Bahamas. What happened was the concert goers ended up sleeping in tents on wet mattresses and they apparently had no food or water. (At least according to the documentary.) They were literally stranded on an island. And there was no actual concert. Stranded in the Bahamas doesn’t sound too bad, but I do enjoy food and water so that would have pissed me off. And you know, the amount of money that these people paid to go to the festival was insanely high.
First off, how in the hell did I not hear about this? 2017 was not that long ago and I was definitely not living under a rock. While I was watching the show I was scrolling through Instagram trying to see posts from the festival, but sadly I mostly just saw about a zillion memes. I guess it was all over Twitter, but I’m not much of a Twitter girl. I still don’t understand how I missed all of this living in the social media world that we live in right now.
Secondly, one of the headlining acts was Blink 182. Now, I loved Blink 182 when I was in high school, but that was a long time ago. I’m kinda thinking I wouldn’t even pay $70 a ticket to go see them at a local casino concert venue. Much less thousands of dollars to see them perform? Which is fine, because they didn’t go through with it anyway obviously. But, do they still, like, make music?
I went and saw Smashmouth in concert a few years ago and I pretty much think of these two bands on the same level. And that Smashmouth concert was freaking horrible. I think I paid $22 for that ticket and they didn’t even check to make sure I had a ticket when I walked in the door. I could have literally gone for free.
Also, I understand that a lot of people don’t feel for the festival goers that spent money to go to the festival because they obviously had the money to spend. Listen, just because you have money doesn’t mean it came easily. No, I’m not rich but I know that working for money is freaking hard. I get pissed off when I pay $15 for a meal and it isn’t the best meal of my entire life so I would have been livid over this ordeal. I totally feel for those people that thought they were getting the experience of the lifetime.
More than anything I feel for the woman that got stuck footing the bill to her employees after Fyre left the island without paying anything. She ended up digging money out of her life savings to pay her people. Saving money is hard! It takes discipline and then if you are anything like me, you are dreaming about what you will do with that money later. Even if its just used for an emergency fund, it’s not fair to have to pull out that money to pay for a mistake that wasn’t yours. That was your money in case your water heater floods your house! I did see that she started a go fund me account and was able to raise the money to pay for the vendor bills and to put money back in her savings account. Still unfair and still should have never happened.
I spent some time on Ja Rules Instagram page reading his posts. He actually posted an apology to that sweet woman, and when someone said “Why don’t you pay her back the money she spent?” He replied that she already raised it all through Go Fund Me. I 1000% wanted to throw up because it should have never came to this in the first place. She should not have been put in that position and that money should have been offered to her by Ja Rule long before this documentary came out.
Ok, enough ranting. Here are the valuable lessons I took away from this documentary.
- Never go to a music festival during its first year. Ever. No matter how much money you have to spend. It’s not a good idea. Sit back and say: “Yes, maybe we will go next year. Let’s give them a year to work out all the kinks.” Like you know, food, space, sleeping arrangements, water, and actual musical performances.
- I want to go to the Bahamas real bad. Like so bad its almost an obsession. But not to a music festival. And I’ll make my own hotel reservations thank you very much. Actually, I’m really thinking the Bahamas would be amazing to cruise to. But, that’ll be a few years from now at least. That water looks absolutely majestic.
- If someone is ordering ANYTHING from you, you need to collect payment up front. (Ok, I actually learned this lesson when I ran my business and didn’t follow through with it so I ended up losing a lot of money that way.)
- FOMO is for real. (Fear of missing out) All of these people paid insane amounts of money to go a festival that was promising big things with no real way of proving what they would deliver. It’s really ok to not be the one that does everything. It’s ok to sit at home and not spend zillions of dollars to be a cool kid.
- Don’t make yourself go broke so you can impress people on social media. It’s not worth it and they probably aren’t that impressed with you anyway.
Have you watched the documentary? What did you think of it? And more importantly, is this the first time you heard about this? Or was I legit living under a rock?
