If You Paid Ja Rule $10,000 for Anything In 2017, You Deserve Whatever The Fuck Happens To You

How exactly would Ja contribute to your good time at the Fyre Festival?

In one of my all-time favorite Dave Chappelle stand-up routines, he discusses celebrity worship and laments on our tendency to care what famous people think about tragic events. He lampooned MTVโ€™s search for a quote from Ja Rule on the events of September 11: โ€œGet hold of this muthafucka so I can make sense of all this! Whereโ€ฆ isโ€ฆJa?!?โ€

Video will return here when scrolled back into view
Trump’s Tariffs Might Stick Around. What Should We Buy Now?
Trump’s Tariffs Might Stick Around. What Should We Buy Now?

The routine came to mind the moment I learned the following three things all at once: thereโ€™s a thing called Fyre Festival, a two-weekend high-end music and โ€œcultureโ€ festival in the Bahamas thatโ€™s essentially the bourgie assholeโ€™s Coachella alternative; the festival was a slow-moving train wreck that was canceled the day it started; and Ja Rule was behind its conception.

People shelled out five and six figures to attend something that Jeffrey Atkins conjured up (along with a businessman who wasnโ€™t alive during the first season of โ€œThe Fresh Prince of Bel-Airโ€ and who apparently has a history of shitbox business deals). Yes, that Jeffrey Atkins. What has Ja Rule organized in the past that qualified him to, in any way, mastermind a multi-million-dollar event aimed at multi-millionaires? A second mortgage on his house? The antibiotics cabinet in said house?

All of the people who dropped $10,000 and up on an event helmed by Mr. โ€œItโ€™s not how you stand by your car, itโ€™s how you race your carโ€ deserve what they got, and I donโ€™t feel bad for them. Not even a little bit. I donโ€™t care if I were Mark fucking Cubanโ€ฆlearning that Ja Rule โ€“ progenitor of early-aughts growl-rap-nโ€™-B whose last noteworthy anything was picking at the guy who effectively ended his rap career on Twitter โ€“ was at the helm of a brand new music festival event that demanded exponentially more money than other successful music festivals that have existed for decades wouldโ€™ve motivated me to do something better with my racks. Like invest in a time share, start an alpaca farm or just set that shit on fire Heath Ledger-style.

Fyre Festival was supposed to be a bacchanalia of sorts featuring Top 40 music acts, high-end lodging and first-class eats. But in a series of moves that would make Joanne the Scammer proud, the organizers didnโ€™t properly pay the talent or the staff and failed to cobble together security, stages, adequate lodging or damn near anything else youโ€™d find at a high school parking lot fair. Hapless idiots took planes from Miami to Great Exuma thinking they were going to step off the plane to glasses of Ace of Spades and immediately get ushered off to gold-adorned bathhouses containing half-naked, beautiful women on some โ€œthe royal penis is clean, your majestyโ€ type shit.

Instead, they basically landed on the set of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The โ€œvillasโ€ were Costco tents; the gourmet meals were white bread, cheese and salad straight from Rikers Island; and the beautiful island waters were a shark-infested, โ€œWhereโ€™s Catlin?โ€ missing-white-girl-on-spring-break national tragedy waiting to happen. The festivalโ€™s organization was so clusterfuckish that flights to the island were canceled because it couldnโ€™t physically support the crowd.

The fact that the musical lineup was always unconfirmed should have been enough to scare away festival goers, and the headliners who were promised โ€“ including Blink 182, Desiigner, and Tyga โ€“ should have given everyone pause: Blink-182 was to headline an event targeting an audience who was under the age of 10 the last time the band had an album that matters. And I doubt even Tygaโ€™s mama would pay $10,000 to see Tyga one more time before he died.

My guess is the rich really went to Great Exuma to rub elbows with the bevy of supermodels in the promotional video, all of whom could walk up to me and do that thing I like to my earlobe and I wouldnโ€™t be able to identify them. They and every other celebrity who promoted the event are catching hell on Twitter โ€“ especially Kendall Jenner, who at this point should just hang it up and enroll in a criminal justice program at DeVry University ahead of the inevitable Kardashian bubble burst. Iโ€™m sure this wonโ€™t hurt Jaโ€™s โ€œbrandโ€, as that would be tantamount to tossing a bag of poodle droppings in a landfill.

Of course, those of us in the proletariat get a kick out of this because itโ€™s easier to feel schadenfreude over the misfortunes of people who have at least five figures to drop on a music festival without paying attention to all those bright, Murder Inc.-stamped red flags. Iโ€™ve been utterly amused by the testimonials from the pink shorts-rocking, Lululemon collective that read like a Syrian refugeeโ€™s recount of leaving his war-torn country: โ€œOh-em-gee the locals grazed my arm my life is in danger thank God Trevor had extra space on his private jet to get us outta there!โ€

(The best testimonial, with the dopest final sentence Iโ€™ve read in a piece this year, came from a talent producer who quit and got the fuck out before it fell apart.)

Perhaps the funniest and most absurd part of it is that the Fyre Festival organizers have already announced that theyโ€™re going to try it again next year. Sure enough, some of the same rich bozos who got burned this year will give it another shot in 2018, because thatโ€™s the privilege of the One Percent. But if Ja bails as an organizer, I hear Carl Thomas and Blu Cantrell have a bit of space in their schedulesโ€ฆ

Straight From The Root

Sign up for our free daily newsletter.