Fyre Festival. It’s the most ambitious music fest to never happen. And now a planned live action role-playing (LARP) version is set to not happen in Detroit. Confused? That seems to be part of the plan.
With two Fyre Festival documentaries currently generating countless streams on Netflix and Hulu, Michelle Birawer of Detroit’s Harsh Tokes Booking thought it would be funny to commemorate the infamous non-event with this Facebook post announcing a Fyre LARP in April.
What started as a lark soon generated very real interest, with more than six thousand people tagging the event in less than twenty-four hours. The joke had quickly become real. There were promises of recreating the doomed festival with everything from sorry cheese sandwiches to a truck full of luggage in the parking lot of Detroit’s famed Belle Isle.
Belle Isle representatives were not as amused as the rest of us.
“The [Department of Natural Resources] just straight up told me that if I applied for a permit they would deny it,” Birawer told the Detroit Metro Times.
“These are not the type of events we would consider,” DNR’s Chief of Southern Field Operations Scott A. Pratt would tell the publication when asked about Birawer’s claims. “But the person trying to organize this has yet to get into contact with anyone at the Belle Isle office or anyone else. She went ahead and put a date and time on Facebook and ran with it with no approvals from DNR staff.”
Birawer has not been deterred: “The Department of Natural Resources does not want us,” reads an updated event posting. “So we are going to bring the party to the party island of Hamtramck instead!”
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of metro Detroit will tell you that Hamtramck is hardly an island, although the historically Polish enclave within the city knows how to party (try getting a Pączki on Fat Tuesday and tell me I’m wrong).
For her part, Birawer has immersed herself in the role of promoter, boasting in true Fyre fashion that “I have the Outer Limits stage already booked with Fleetwood Mac and Neil Young.”
More details are expected this Saturday, February 2, when she’s scheduled to hold a press conference at Hamtramck’s KO Gallery at 3 p.m., which will be livestreamed on Facebook.
Ja Rule has yet to comment.
