Central Track ContributorYou're A Party Pooper, Jared.
Dear Jared Guynes,
How are things? Hopefully you haven't been too stressed out this week, getting ready for your Epic Party. We know how hard it can be putting epic events together, so we'd be slightly empathetic if things haven't been all that epic for you this past week.
Why only slightly? Well, frankly, it's because you — or at least your online persona — and your Epic Party are so awful.
Look: When we first heard about your party, we'll admit that, while we thought it sounded kind of stupid, we ultimately found it mostly harmless. You want some crowdfunding to bring in a group of, at best, epically mediocre '90s talents and serve everybody lukewarm Cane Rosso? That's fine. And, hey, we get it: Who wouldn't find the prospect of Vanilla Ice reenacting arguably the most famous scene from Secret of the Ooze in a live setting at least mildly amusing?
For starters? Us. Because we're not 12.
Still, the reason we find your event so infuriating is bigger than the fact that it's just not really our thing. We're a little flabbergasted that you were able to sell this thing out, especially considering that, when we saw Jessie Ware at the same venue — y'know, an artist with some actual talent — she couldn't sell half as many tickets that this assortment of has-beens has.
To be fair, that's not totally on you.
Really, you're just giving the people what they want. It's not your fault that what the people of Dallas want in 2014 just might, in fact, be an epically dense offering of seeing Vanilla Ice, Tone-Loc and Rob Base 20 years past their prime.
We've been doing our best to just grin and bear all this, finding ourselves somewhere between just trying to ignore the whole thing and getting our knickers in a twist over Dallas' so-frequent tendency to embrace nostalgia of dubious origins over seeing acts that are fresh, vibrant and challenging.
Then we saw what happened with your funding efforts.
According to your original, most-epic proposal, the entire event was to be epically non-profit. The crowd-funding was supposed to cover all the costs and then everybody was just supposed to be able to have an epic good time. Dumbfoundingly, you almost doubled your fundraising goal of $40,000.
So now we have a few questions about what's happened in the lead up to the party.
If the event is genuinely not for profit, and is more than fully funded, why does it have an epic official sponsor? More troublingly, why have you continued to sell tickets to the party? If you aren't trying to make an epic pile of cash, why are you trying to make things more crowded, and less fun, for everybody who believed in your epic dream right from the start? We're sure your original patrons would rather have more pizza to themselves rather than stand elbow-to-sweaty-elbow with all the late-comers. Maybe — and we're giving you an epic benefit of the doubt here — you had some costs you didn't expect. We get it: Young MC can't come cheap more than 20 years after his short-lived prime. So maybe you needed to sell some more tickets. If that's the case, why have the tickets gone up in price twice — to an epically astonishing $100 at this point — since their initial offering?
Maybe you're still handling the event with epically altruistic intentions. If you are, we apologize. But if it walks like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and talks like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle…
Point is, after checking up on your online behavior, we realize we shouldn't have expected anything better.
Basically, your whole internet oeuvre consists of trying — and often failing — to whore yourself out to corporate entities and running a patently offensive motorcycle forum.
Let's start with your epic Chili's diet. In a laughable, and remarkably lengthy, attempt to get the attention of the gastronomically distressing chain, you ate and posted photos of your epically depressing meals from the restaurant for almost a year. Makes sense. Your name is Jared, the Subway guy's name is Jared. He was fat, you were fat. He was in commercials, you wanted to be in commercials. Maybe after six solid months of inattention, you should have gotten the message, though. Chili's wasn't interested.
OK, we know that's wasn't the worst thing in the world. We guess our lives would be a little easier with some epic corporate sponsorships (and, we admit, they sometimes are), too — as you've shown us with your extreme Monster Energy Drink 1999 Camaro that you insist on dragging out at car shows far and wide.
That stuff's excusable. Everybody has a price. Yours just seems to be a little low, which is fine.
What isn't cool is the car and motorcycle forum you operate, ricekiller.com. The website's landing page is basically an extended rationalization of how the site's use of the term “rice” isn't actually derogatory, despite the fact that it is, in the way anyone would understand it, a term used exclusively as a pejorative to deride Asian-made motorcycles and cars and often, by extension, Asian people. According to you, it's just means “radically immature car enthusiasts.”
C'mon.
Unlike everything up until this point, we just can't possibly let that one slide. That's the common refuge of the casually racist, claiming that the use of an overtly racist word or phrase actually refers to a type of behavior rather than a group of people. The fact that you need a video and extended disclaimer on your site expressing this should probably tell you something.
Point is, Jared, we hope the pizza's cold and Vanilla Ice brings his baseball bat to your party.
Not really yours,
Stephen Young and the rest of the Central Track staff
