Disgruntled VMA-Nominated Director Had A Shitty Time On His Crowdfunded Night Out
John Shearer
Remember that VMA-nominated director Josh Forbes who was forced to crowdfund his $450-$800 ticket to the illustrious MTV ceremony? Well, he managed to afford attending the show, but he still had a shitty, shitty time. Though he normally makes under-the-radar music videos and zombie movies, this dude hit the jackpot when Walk The Moon’s annoying-as-hell-but-I-still-sing-along “Shut Up And Dance” shot to the top of the charts. He directed that video, and it was nominated for Best Rock Video, so that’s why he wanted to attend the show at all.
The Daily Beast reported on his original snub, and now they’ve let him write an entire first-person essay about his horrible time. The whole thing is a whiny stream-of-consciousness string of complaints about this party — that he got to attend for free after all — and it reads exactly how you would expect a first-person essay from a B-list director who is trying to go viral to read.
Some choice excerpts:
Free booze and food! I order a whiskey and Diet Coke. The “food” consists primarily of nachos, candy and popcorn. For $1300 I assumed we’d be eating nigiri off the naked body of Kate Middleton, but it looks like we’ll have to make do.
Peak luxury, eating off a woman’s naked body. But Forbes is just getting started.
Miley shows up. She rolls out of a rainbow butthole dressed like a Sabado Gigante hoochie and pulls off a pair of multi-colored, furry sleeves, revealing the arms of an eight-year-old boy. She commends some shirtless creep for fucking up the moon man statue. Can we talk about this for a second? How bummed would you be to get one of these things? A peace sign? Really?
I wasn’t a fan of Miley’s performance as a host either, but hoochie? Is this 1950? Also, shirtless creep = Jeremy Scott.
It continues:
They call up Kanye West for the Vanguard Award. When he appears on stage, the crowd goes bonkers. Everyone stands up. It’s like the Second Coming. He’s dressed like he just snuck out of desert space prison but nobody seems to care.
Definitely no issues with saying an iconic black artist is dressed like he snuck out of prison.
Thanks for dressing up, @kanyewest.
— Josh Forbes (@bestjoshforbes) August 31, 2015
Not to mention Kanye was wearing not-yet-released attire from his own line, any item from which would sell on eBay for more than the cost of Forbes’ entire outfit.
Then, Forbes decides to attend not just one afterparty, but two. Here’s some of his 1 AM poetry from the second one:
This whole thing is a shitshow. It is so loud. Every girl is spilling out of her dress. It’s like someone poured semen on a turd, stirred it with a vape pen and gave birth to an army of terrible people.
To be fair, these were the drink prices at the where the second afterparty he attended was held:
Losing his $14 drink and reading this menu leads to another late-night meditation on drink prices, immigrant workers, Bernie Sanders, and Wes Craven:
I start wondering about the kind of person who has $25,000 to spend on a single night of drinking. Honestly, most years I’m lucky to make that much money as a working director. It makes me think about all the dedicated immigrant workers who are probably cleaning up Miley Cyrus’s mylar jellyfish and body glitter right now. It makes me think of how much I want Bernie Sanders to become president, but how that will never happen because he’s not Kanye enough. It makes me miss Wes Craven.
To top it all off, Bieber shows up at the party. Earlier in the night, Forbes described Bieber as someone who “looks like he works the drive-thru at goth Arby’s.”
Seeing a massive celebrity up close is pretty thrilling, but it wears off after about fifteen seconds. I mean, if I saw Jackie Chan in real life and he was doing flips and beating people up, I’d probably start crying. But seeing a gangly 21-year-old kid with a fuzz-stache singing live karaoke to his own song felt sort of sad. It was like watching a trained elephant being prodded to come out and do tricks. It bummed me out. Then I started thinking about how much money this fuzz-stache has and how people like him are the only types of people that can afford a $50,000 order of “You Only Live Once” or a $25,000 “You Can’t Sit With Us.”
At this point, all I’m thinking about is that well-intentioned people gave this guy $1300 to bring his wife to an award show and make derogatory comments about everyone around him.
LIVE on #Periscope: Diarrhea's point of view https://t.co/N3VD1Sq0ZL
— Josh Forbes (@bestjoshforbes) August 31, 2015
You can read the whole piece here.
