How to Hire a Pop Star for Your Private Party

At ten o’clock on a recent Saturday night, the rapper Flo Rida was in his dressing room with a towel over his head, in a mode of quiet preparation. Along one wall, a handsome buffet—lobster, sushi, Dom Pérignon—sat untouched. Flo Rida, whose stage name honors his home state but is pronounced like “flow rider,” is fastidious about his physique. He is six feet three, two hundred and twenty pounds, and often travels with a trainer, though on this occasion the trip was brief enough that he would do without. That afternoon, a private jet had carried him, along with eight of his backup performers and assistants, from South Florida to Chicago. By the following night, he would be back at his mansion in Miami.

Flo Rida, who is forty-three, attained celebrity in 2008 with his song “Low,” an admiring ode to a Rubenesque beauty on the dance floor. “Low” went platinum ten times over and was No. 1 on the Billboard charts for ten weeks—a longer run than any other song that year, including Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” In 2009, Flo landed another No. 1 hit, “Right Round,” which broke a world record, jointly held by Eminem, 50 Cent, and Dr. Dre, for the most downloads in an opening week. Flo never matched the stardom of those peers, but he has recorded another nine Top Ten hits, sold at least a hundred million records, and secured for himself a lucrative glide from ubiquity. His endorsement deals are of sufficient scale that, in a recent breach-of-contract dispute with one of his brand partners, Celsius energy drinks, a jury awarded him eighty-three million dollars.

A man with this kind of nest egg might never need to leave home again. But, on this evening, Flo had journeyed north on business: he was playing a bar mitzvah, for a thirteen-year-old boy and three dozen of his friends, in the well-to-do Chicago suburb of Lincolnshire. The bar-mitzvah boy, in keeping with the customs of his forebears, had chanted his way into adulthood; then, following a more recent tradition, the celebrants had relocated to a warehouse-size event venue that is highly regarded on Chicago’s mitzvah circuit. A production company had installed the décor, including roller coasters stencilled across the dance floor and a banquet table made to resemble a red Ferrari. The whole affair was invisible to the outside world, except for the word “Andrew” projected by brilliant red floodlights onto an exterior wall.

The entertainment had been arranged by Andrew’s father, an executive at a financial-services company. At first, he had doubted that Flo Rida, his son’s favorite artist, would agree to come, but an agent informed him that most big-name musicians are available these days, under the right conditions. Flo Rida’s fee for private gigs in the United States runs between a hundred and fifty thousand and three hundred thousand dollars, depending on location, scale, and other particulars. Reginald Mathis, his lawyer, told me, “Internationally, it could run you up to a million.” For the Lincolnshire bar mitzvah, the contract stipulated private-jet travel, suitable accommodations, and a fee “in the six figures,” Mathis said; Flo Rida would perform for thirty minutes. When I saw Andrew’s father at the event, he was thrilled with the outcome but declined to have his name in this story. “I work on Wall Street,” he told me. “I don’t want to end up on Page Six.”

As showtime approached, Flo changed from his travel T-shirt and jeans into performance attire: a much nicer T-shirt (vintage Kiss concert merch), a sleeveless black biker jacket, and cat-eye shades speckled with rhinestones. While the opening act finished up, I stepped out of the dressing room to assess the crowd. From a balcony overlooking the dance floor, surrounded by a hefty array of professional-grade lights and speakers, I watched a desultory turn of the hora, backed by a recorded Hava Nagila. The children seemed preoccupied. Then a platoon of production staff started handing out flashing L.E.D. sticks, and the kids rushed toward the stage in anticipation.

I was joined on the balcony by one of Flo’s bandmates, a younger rapper known as Int’l Nephew, who wore a red sweatband and a black puffy vest over a tank top. We peered across the railing toward the back of the room, where a few dozen parents were sipping cocktails. In the realm of private gigs, those secondary guests are a high-priority demographic—future clients who don’t yet know it. Int’l Nephew saw the makings of a worthwhile trip. “They’re all big-money people,” he said. “And they’re, like, ‘Oh, we want you, Flo.’ ”

By the time Flo Rida bounded onstage, his hands to the heavens, the kids were bouncing to the opening strains of “Good Feeling,” one of his club hits, featuring the sampled voice of Etta James. The edge of the stage was lined by teen-age boys in untucked shirts and jeans, alongside girls in spaghetti-strap dresses and chunky sneakers. Flo was flanked by dancers in black leather bikini tops and mesh leggings. Out of the audience’s view, he kept a set list inscribed with the names of his hosts, as an aide-mémoire. “We love you, Andrew!” he shouted, and barrelled into “Right Round,” a rowdy track about visiting a strip club and showering a pole dancer with hundred-dollar bills. When he pulled Andrew onstage, the bar-mitzvah boy didn’t miss a beat, dancing along to Flo’s verse: “From the top of the pole I watch her go down / She got me throwing my money around.” (...)

In January, Beyoncé did her first show in more than four years—not in a stadium of screaming fans but at a new hotel in Dubai, earning a reported twenty-four million dollars for an hour-long set. More than a few Beyoncé fans winced; after dedicating a recent album to pioneers of queer culture, she was plumping for a hotel owned by the government of Dubai, which criminalizes homosexuality. (As a popular tweet put it, “I get it, everyone wants their coin, but when you’re THAT rich, is it THAT worth it?”) Artists, by and large, did not join the critics. Charles Ruggiero, a drummer in Los Angeles who is active in jazz and rock, told me, “The way musicians look at it, generally speaking, is: It’s a fucking gig. And a gig is a gig is a gig.”

If you have a few million dollars to spare, you can hire Drake for your bar mitzvah or the Rolling Stones for your birthday party. Robert Norman, who heads the private-events department at the talent agency C.A.A., recalls that when he joined the firm, a quarter century ago, “we were booking one or two hundred private dates a year, for middle-of-the-road artists that you’d typically suspect would play these kinds of events—conventions and things like that.” Since then, privates have ballooned in frequency, price, and genre. “Last year, we booked almost six hundred dates, and we’ve got a team of people here who are dedicated just to private events,” Norman said. An agent at another big firm told me, “A lot of people will say, ‘Hey, can you send me your private/corporate roster?’ And I’m, like, ‘Just look at our whole roster, because everybody’s pretty much willing to consider an offer.’ ” (...)

A random selection of other acts who do privates (Sting, Andrea Bocelli, Jon Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Diana Ross, Maroon 5, Black Eyed Peas, OneRepublic, Katy Perry, Eric Clapton) far exceeds the list of those who are known for saying no (Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, and, for reasons that nobody can quite clarify, AC/DC).

Occasionally, the music press notes a new extreme of the private market, like hits on the charts. Billboard reported that the Eagles received six million dollars from an unnamed client in New York for a single performance of “Hotel California,” and Rolling Stone reported that Springsteen declined a quarter of a million to ride motorcycles with a fan. But privates typically are enveloped in secrecy, with both artists and clients demanding nondisclosure agreements and prohibitions on photos and social-media posts. 

by Evan Osnos, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Victor Llorente for The New Yorker