In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life
presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything
that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. -- Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967
In the midst of all the talk about the Oscar nominations, someone I know
on twitter recently commented that the two Fyre Festival documentaries were the
feel-good movies of the year. The
documentaries (“Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened,” on Netflix, and
“Fyre Fraud,” on Hulu) depict the events leading up to, during, and after, an
extraordinarily inept music festival that was supposed to occur on Great
Exuma, in the Bahamas, in the spring of 2017.
Both documentaries gleefully expose the huge amount of
hubris required to stage such a big failure, so the viewing pleasure the
tweeter referred to was either the fact that they showed lots of rich people
having a very bad time and also, perhaps, that the promoter, Billy McFarland, was
sentenced to 6 years in jail. In fact, my own ability to take pleasure in thes
documentaries referred to something else entirely: the fact that, as co-promoter
Ja Rule says at one point, “at least no one died.”
Although that sounds
ridiculously cynical, it’s actually a good point. Altamont, 1969: one man killed in full view of the audience by a Hell’s
Angel, who was later acquitted. Roskilde, 2000: 9 people dead. Love Parade 2010: 19
deaths. Route 91, Las Vegas: 851 injured, 51 dead. At the Fyre Festival, concert goers were merely
inconvenienced by having to spend a night at the airport. Oh, plus, they lost
their money, but what else is new? Anyway,
given the comparative gentleness of the punishment, it’s easy to mock the whole
fiasco – if you don’t care to take into account what happened to the Bahamanians
who were involved.
The Fyre Festival documentaries were of especial interest to
me, because music festivals are my scholarly area. In fact, I just published a book about them, in which I trace the seeds of the kind of dystopia that the Fyre
Festival made real. Much like the people who made these films, I started my
book with a core research question. I wanted to understand why music festival
goers see festivals as being spaces of freedom, when in fact they are the
opposite: jails, almost, where basic amenities are costly and privacy is
non-existent.
If you have attended even a small outdoor music festival,
you are probably aware that they are the direct opposite of every one of these
promises. A photograph of Bonnaroo by air, for example, depicts an urban nightmare of overcrowding transposed
on a once-pristine meadow. Yet year after year, concert goers fall for this disjunction
and my goal, in taking on this project, was to understand the roots of this
riddle.
In my book, I looked at a number of historical festivals to identified
four appeals that I claimed underpin festival rhetoric. These were geographical
remoteness, idylls of nature and ecology, the availability of sex and drugs,
and racialized narratives about unity that obscure the way that race is usually
coopted at festivals and used as a form of spectacle. The Fyre Festival
organizers definitely took advantage of some of these false narratives –
certainly the availability of sex and drugs is heavily implied, as was the appeal
of being at an obscure location on a ‘private Caribbean island’ (a natural feature
that would soon be wrecked by the advent of 10,000 concert goers). But to
those, it added a few new twists, such as the use of the name Pablo Escobar, a
video ad using a lot of super famous models cavorting on yachts, and a lot of ad-copy
touting access to the most obvious types of vulgar luxury – private jets,
beaches, backstage passes, and so forth.
These appeals don’t really conform to any of my ideas about
typical music festival appeals, which skew more towards concepts of community-building,
utopian ideals, and Bohemian hipness. True, those narratives aren’t any more
real than the ones of Fyre, but the Fyre festival ones are so far off the usual
ones that it’s like looking at them in a funhouse mirror. For example, the
romanticization of Escobar – who, as the Hulu doc pointed out, was not so much
a role model as a brutal murderer — is more in line with the way young people
today worship businessmen like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk without assigning
a judgment to their foibles. Billy McFarland’s inane insistence on using the
name “Pablo Escobar” in his promotional materials at the risk of losing access
to the island in question – which he did — shows that he had absolutely gauged
the appeal of that narrative at it’s worth. The concert sold out in hours.
The distortion of reality – even just the distortion of the
illusions that underpin festival going --
extends way beyond the rhetorical appeals of the original ad for Fyre and the whole
idiotic concept of it, all the way through to its denouement. For me, one of
the most telling moments in the documentary was when Andy King – the infamous
‘give a blow job for the team’ guy – says that at the height of the madness, he
kept thinking about Woodstock, and how what was really a disaster on the ground
has been remembered throughout the ages as this fabulous success. In once
sense, he’s right, and it makes sense to invoke that image. But Woodstock had
one thing that the Fyre Festival lacked: legendary performances by contemporary
musical giants. The aesthetic excellence of the Fyre Festival’s musical content
was nil. It was all just an excuse to
cavort on the beach with imaginary models.
All of this is just to say that to my mind, the Fyre
Festival simply wasn’t a typical musical festival at all. There may be some
lessons to learn from it, but they are not the ones that the documentaries say
they are. Both of them blame three things for the debacle: McFarland, social
media (specifically, Instagram), and, most prominently, Millennials, and what
are said to be their values and practices. But I don’t buy it. Sure, McFarland
was a huckster, abetted by a number of other hucksters, most prominently Ja
Rule. Nothing new about that, it’s the American condition, and why someone once
said, there’s a sucker born every
minute. But social media and Millenials come in for a very bad rap here – so
bad, that one can’t help but think that the makers of these documentaries are
trying to avert our eyes from something far worse.
Instagram, for example, surely doesn’t deserve to bear the
brunt of this debacle. Certainly the Fyre Festival’s use of Instagram exploited
a particular area of it – that space where ‘influencers’ hawk their lifestyles.
But there are millions of users of Instagram, myself, for instance, who have
never gone near an influencer’s page, who had no idea about the Festival, and
who wouldn’t be induced to by a ticket to it if they did. I never once saw one
of those Fyre-colored profile pages, and I’m on Instagram constantly. Surely the Fyre Festival certainly maxed out the number of people
who’d buy into its false promises – and remember, many of those we see in the
documentary were being comped in, so they didn’t spend any money on it.
To put the onus on millennials is even more specious,
because not all millennials are obsessed with glamour. Example: Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez is a millennial, and one who spends a lot of time on social media,
too. She isn’t a Fyre-faller, nor are simply millions and millions of others,
even ones who go to music festivals. To taint them all as being shallow and
obsessed with their image is to willfully ignore the fact that the Fyre
Festival appealed only to a relatively small number of people who had bad
judgment about this one thing. Hopefully, they learned a lesson from it.
Besides, one should always distrust blanket assessments of
generations like the ones that the Hulu documentary was laden with:
“millennials do this, millennials do that.” Millennials come in all shapes and
sizes, and one thing often not noted about them is that many of them are
incredibly hard workers. This was evident in the documentary, as we saw many
millenials continue to work for McFarland well beyond the point when it became
clear that the concert was going down. True, judging from the interviews in
both, many employees weren’t even remotely concerned about the fact that they
worked for someone they fully recognized as a scam artist, to build an app (or a
festival) that was clearly sleazy, and this is curious – but I wouldn’t attribute
it to their generation alone: this lack of moral grounding is a question that
haunts not just the Fyre Festival, but our entire economy right now. Indeed,
the same question could and should be asked about the people involved in the
Trump administration. Both sets of employees exhibit complete disinterest in
ethics of their employers: they’re obviously smart and well educated, or they
couldn’t do their jobs, but don’t seem to make any value judgment about what
they’re involved in supporting. From the seemingly sensible woman in the
Netflix doc who was working on the Fyre app to the young guy who booked the
festival by paying the artists way more than their typical fees, their focus is
not on the content of what they’re doing, but on how well they themselves can
do it.
If you’re going to lay a guilt trip on the people involved
in Fyre, that might be the place to lay it – except that there is a word for
that kind of detachment: Marx called it ‘alienation,” and it’s a core feature
of capitalism. So, much as I’d like to indulge in some schadenfreude, I
personally don’t think it’s something any of us should feel superior to,
especially not the producers of the Hulu documentary, who paid Mr. McFarland an
undisclosed sum just so he could appear on camera and say “No comment” or “I
don’t know” over and over again. Isn’t that exactly the kind of cynicism and
bad faith that they spend the whole documentary accusing other people of indulging
in?
Neither of those realizations made this a “feel good,” movie
for me exactly, but not everything about it sucked. In fact, after it aired,
some people started a Go Fund Me page for the Bahamian woman, Maryann Rolle,
who’d lost $50,000 feeding all the workers at the festival site, and within
days they’d surpassed that goal. In short, the Fyre Festival documentary may
have exhibited some of the worst impulses of a few people who live amongst
us right now. But it also prompted some of the best – and that fact alone kind
of shows that the documentaries had a flawed thesis.
