Jered Threatin is Lying to the Press and is Up to His Old Tricks Once Again
Over the past few days, both Rolling Stone and The BBC have released longform pieces about Threatin. Much of that space is devoted to recapping the insane, bizarre and insanely bizarre series of events that transpired over a week and a half in November, as readers of those publications, which cater to a wider audience than we’re accustomed to here, are less likely to have caught it all as it unfolded in real-time. For those of us who were transfixed by this story as it was happening, the pièces de résistance, of course, were the interviews with the man himself, the one and only Jered Threatin (Jered Eames).
I won’t recap everything Jered said in those interviews; you can, and should, read them when you have the time. What I’d like to focus on instead is Jered’s claim, which has become his main talking point, that it was his plan from the very beginning for his hoax to be discovered, that the end goal was always to be “outed” by the press, causing a viral surge that would propel him to notoriety.
That assertion is 100% bullshit.
First, it doesn’t pass the eye test. We’ve all encountered desperate local musicians in our lives, and it’s not that huge of a leap to imagine one of them going to extensive means to make their bands appear bigger than they are (although Threatin certainly took that concept to its logical extreme). Further, we all watched the story unfold in real-time and we know how it really went down. We saw the fabricated live videos and the vanity photo shoots, we saw Jered pull the video interviews he conducted with himself and shut down his social media pages in a panic when his story started making the rounds. We spoke to his former band members, who had no clue about any of it, and watched Jered fumble with a “fake news” explanation when he finally resurfaced. It’s inconceivable that it was all orchestrated to unfold exactly that way.
But don’t accept our opinion alone: let’s look at the facts.
Jered told BBC that he sent out emails during the very first days of the European tour, before everything blew up, using yet another alias (“E. Evieknowsit”), to a number of news outlets in an attempt to preemptively tip them off to his scheme. “The musician going by the name Threatin is a total fake,” he alleges those emails read. “He faked a record label, booking agent, facebook likes, and an online fanbase to book a European tour. ZERO people are coming to the shows and it is clear that his entire operation is fake.”
MetalSucks did in fact receive an email from E. Evieknowsit, the contents of which were a bit different than the above but expressed the same overall sentiment. The problem is that we received it on November 17th, a week after the story broke and ten days after Jered claims he sent it:
What’s more, BBC author Jessica Lussenhop has showed us what Threatin claimed was an email he sent MetalSucks on November 7th, but which we never received (we even checked our spam folder):
The PRP, in a recap post of the BBC piece, notes that they also received a similar email on the 17th, not the 7th.
Metal Injection, who were also on the list of email recipients that Threatin relayed to BBC, did not receive any emails from E. Evieknowsit at all. BBC themselves were unable to verify whether they had received such an email due to the fluid and overwhelming nature of general news tip inboxes at large publications (a calculation we’re guessing Jered is relying on to explain why emails he “sent” may be missing).
Consequence of Sound has not yet responded to my request to verify whether they received such an email and if so, when they did. I will update this post if they get back to me. [UPDATE, December 18th, 10:08am EST: The editors of Consequence of Sound tell me they did not receive any emails from the above alias or any others concerning Threatin. Additionally, the editors at MetalInsider.net forwarded me an email from that alias that was sent on November 17th, just like the others.]
In short, I repeat: Jered Eames is full of shit. He showed the BBC reporter forged emails and spun a story intended to prove it was his plan all along to turn himself into a viral sensation. I give him credit for trying to roll with it and make the best of his current situation, but his story has way too many holes. Also, for what it’s worth, a point both Rolling Stone and BBC missed: why would we believe someone who’s been already been proven to be a serial liar? Fool me once…
Here’s another hole Jered surely didn’t anticipate. Eames told the BBC that his music gained so much traction from the resulting media coverage that he returned home from tour with more merch orders from his webstore than he could fill. “I came home to literally thousands and thousands of CD sales. I have a cult following,” he said.
That is another blatant lie.
On November 12th I ordered a shirt from the official Threatin store to wear to the MetalSucks holiday party as a gag (it went over GREAT, everyone loved it! I will probably never wear it again). Here is a screen shot of the confirmation email I received:
What’s noteworthy here is the order number: 10025. Unless we are to believe that more than 10,000 people have ordered Threatin merchandise in the past — highly unlikely given no one heard of this guy before November 9th — we can assume that the Wix template Jered used to set up his store starts with a default order number of 10001, a standard feature of such software. That would mean that, between the date he set up the store (likely around the time of his album release in August 2017) and the time I ordered my shirt, a whopping 24 people had placed orders. That’s hardly “thousands.” While I’m sure a steady stream of orders trickled in as the story spread in subsequent days, I’m not buying for a second that he even cracked 100.
“But Vince,” I hear you saying (or “Ben” if you know me personally), “even if Jered’s claims about his attempts to manipulate the media are false, aren’t you giving him exactly what he wants by continuing to cover the story?” I hear you, and to some extent the answer is “yes,” but only on the surface.
Sure, Jered currently has the attention he craves, but what he really wants is to make it as a musician, claiming to both Rolling Stone and BBC that booking agents and record labels have reached out to him about working together and that he has big plans for the future. To any extent that’s true (and it certainly could be), I can’t imagine those conversations will get very far; everyone in the music industry will be quick to realize there’s nothing here, it was just a curious viral story of the moment that will soon be a funny anecdote or a question on Jeopardy. Jered is certainly experiencing plenty of attention at the moment but not for his stated goal, and as is usually the case with internet scandals that will fade away over time (it already had until RS and the BBC temporarily brought it back into the conversation). Anyone who would come out to see him live might do so once for the spectacle, then never again. Jered’s music is still mediocre (I won’t say it’s bad, because it isn’t), and it’s not going to take him very far. Even an attempt to team him up with big-name producers and push out a new album release with big marketing dollars behind it will fall flat in spite of the whole storyline connected to it; history is littered with examples which prove that good marketing can only take a band so far.
Jered’s brother Scott, who we spoke to at length last month, sums it up to BBC: “He’s a master manipulator. I want to be the voice of reason here. This is like every other profession and you’ve lied to everyone in your profession, so I don’t know where he’s going with this. He can be the internet sensation if he wants, but he’s not going be the musician that he wants to be.”
In short, don’t believe anything you read or hear out of Jered Eames’ mouth now or ever. He thought he could fake his way to the top and he got outed, simple as that. And now he quotes himself for a living.
Negativity Sells. If you want to get people talking…give them something to complain about.
I manufactured a controversy and the media bought it. pic.twitter.com/SdUKcbqH23
— Threatin (@JeredThreatin) December 16, 2018
