Fyre Festival is likely to go down as one of the great boondoggles in music fest history, stranding a bunch of upwardly mobile party goers in their own private, wristband-powered version of the Hunger Games. But while organizer Ja Rule—and especially his co-founder, recently arrested New York entrepreneur Billy McFarland—have been the largest targets of criticism for the Fest’s disastrous tent-city outcome, another culprit has come forward to accept some of the blame: Blink-182 and Alkaline Trio singer-guitarist Matt Skiba, and his amazing sorcerous powers.
Per Rolling Stone, Skiba recently gave an interview in which he disparaged the festival—which Blink-182 dropped out of shortly before it was set to kick off—saying, “I had a bad feeling about that event.” Thus wigged out, he brought the dark magics that are his right—as the scion of not just one, but two pop punk institutions—to bear on the Caribbean festival. “I consider myself a pagan and a witch,” Skiba said. “With every inch of my energy I wanted Fyre not to happen. I put all the electricity and energy in my body against that thing happening.” And not happening, it did. (Not?)
Skiba says his dislike for the festival—which listed ticket prices starting at $5,000, and only went up from there—stemmed from more than just bad vibes; he also said he was disgusted by its flaunting of opulence in front of the poverty-stricken members of the non-partying-tourists population of the Bahamas. “It’s classist and racist and then they decided to park a bunch of yachts with models to show off in front of these poor people, going down there with all your Ferraris and bullshit and yachts,” Skiba said, adding that he’s happy to take the credit for the festival’s collapse. “I’ll take responsibility and everyone can blame me. Shazam. I was on my couch feeling somewhat guilty, but very relieved that I wasn’t there with people stealing from each other.”
It’s worth noting that the initial interview where Skiba said this stuff—to NME—appears to have have been pulled, possibly at the behest of some poor publicist, who’d finally convinced themselves that the “Blink-182 singer saying crazy stuff about the supernatural” portion of their career was well and truly done.