Some date back to Iliad, from Homer, to search for the origin of the famous: “If you deceive me once, it’s your fault; If you fool me twice, it’s my fault.” Its origin is far from clear, but what we could say is that it seems conceived for the Fyre Festival, a musical event on a private island in the Bahamas that in 2017 became an unprecedented fiasco.
Billy McFarland, the brain behind this epic, promised heaven and earth: luxury villas, food gourmet and VIP entertainment. However, what the attendees found was akin to involuntary participation in a reality nightmarish The tents were so basic that they made camping in a dry land in July seem like paradise. Food gourmet It became sad sandwiches in cardboard boxes. And the live music… well, let’s say there was no music at all.
The result: a perfect storm of social media memes, lawsuits, and McFarland’s glorious collapse. It was a spectacle worthy of Hollywood, which is why it has two documentaries —FYRE: The most exclusive party that never happened on Netflix and Fyre Fraud on Hulu—portraying the biggest fiasco in festival history.
With this background, not exactly positive, McFarland has announced that this year the festival is back to its old ways. Although there is still no specific date or location, in August 2023 the organizer dropped that it will be at the end of December 2024 in the Caribbean.
“In my opinion, the success of the disaster documentary in organizing this festival actually gives it incredible brand value, because it has global recognition. So I can see why someone would want to bring out another edition of the Fyre Festival: it will have media buzz again, it will be recognized, maybe the artists want the publicity. The key with this is whether there will really be a Fyre Festival II and what its execution will be,” says Paul Stokes, a British journalist, expert in music and culture, who collaborates with media such as The Guardian.
However, others find it difficult to think that artists and groups will ignore the previous fiasco and join this “new adventure.” “It’s hard to imagine serious and professional people investing time in negotiating their participation in this,” explains Ricard Robles, co-founder of the Sónar festival. And he is right: a new edition of this festival represents a tremendous leap of confidence, in addition to a lot of armored contracts that protect the interests of said artists, although, as Robles adds, “there are always people willing to do the job.” stupid or with aspirations that have nothing to do with sustaining an artistic reputation.”
Expectations for the first edition were through the roof, due to the ambition of the proposal and its objective difficulty when it came to being carried out. However, due to its fame, one wonders if betting on the same concept is a success or the promise of a new cataclysm. “I think the version of Fyre Festival that could work would be to take it a little bit as a joke,” Stokes bets. “Turning it into a kind of immersive experience; a silly and wacky touch that would replicate the attitude of the documentary. I think that if you want to do Fyre Festival II as a serious festival, the supposed luxury event that the first one was, people will be much more wary of the proposal and they will be much more unsure if it is something they want to commit to.
If it can be rebuilt as conceived and fails, the only ones we can blame will be those who have invested in this project again.
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