Surf Used To Sell Dystopian Music Festival!
Living It Up on a tropical island nightmare.
From the poorly-lit cubicle of StabMZ:
Unless you literally only read Stab every single day (in which case, thank you), then you’ll know about rapper Ja Rule’s Fyre Festival. Updates from the calamitous, Lord of the Flies-on-a-tropical-island scam have been clogging news feeds without pause.
Non-existent infrastructure, inadequate food and water supplies, struggling security, ticket holders being forced to sleep in disaster relief tents, all wrapped up in a tropical storm. It was the type of historic clusterfuck one would expect Ja Rule to execute, if he were trusted with multiple payouts of US$1,200 (the average cost of a single ticket) in 2017. Definitely some fun Googling if you have some time to kill.
What’s this got to do with surfing? Nothing, really – except, something caught Stab’s eye while perusing a Vanity Fair article recently. It was a page lifted from the festival’s leaked sales prop:
Computer: Enhance.
Is that… a surfer slob-grabbing in black and white? Why yes, it is.
The above collage was taken from the event’s initial pitch to investors — a 43-page document you can get your hands on here. Something Vanity Fair’s Nick Bilton calls “One of the most preposterous invitations for outside capital that I have ever seen.”
The experience Ja Rule promised Fyre Festival attendees, as demonstrated by Ja Rule.
Our unnamed aerialist (first thought to be Craig Anderson but on closer inspection, actually not), specifically appears in the “Fyre Squad” (cringe) section of the pitch. Which highlights key social media influencers that would spread the good word about the festival. People who Ja Rule, as the document literally quotes, were picked as he only, “Seeks those who light your flames.”
Stab likes to picture Ja Rule Google-Imaging “surfer+surfing+black+white”… but in reality the sales deck was probably made by the douchey 25-year-old tech bro who co-organised the event… or one of his unpaid employees.
Surf sells!
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