Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told, the new documentary on Hulu, wants you to know how Freaknik really started. It wasn’t all-out debauchery that many may recall. Instead, the two-hour documentary celebrates the Atlanta-based event as an extension of Black excellence and a hub where Black music, fashion and culture thrived.
The film begins by taking you back to the 1980s when a group of students from Washington, D.C., attending one of the many historically Black colleges and universities in Atlanta, decided to have an event over their spring break. As members of the D.C. Metro Club, they had already been using “freak” inspired by CHIC’s hit 1978 song “Le Freak” for their party’s theme and decided to mash up the word with picnic (which we know now has negative connotations connected to the lynching of Black people at white-hosted picnics). There were only 50 people in attendance during that first celebration in Piedmont Park, but the concept of Black college students having the opportunity to have fun amongst themselves caught on quickly.
The documentary celebrates how the Black community supported the first “Freaknic” and how it grew. It showcases how Black people commanded our own style of the times, from feathered hair and finger waves (held with a bottle of Bronner Brothers Pump It Up) to Air Max sneakers. As for the booty shorts and other scantily clad clothing choices often worn at Freaknik, the doc positions that young Black women had the opportunity to assert their own sexual individuality and liberation during its early years. And it’s readily admitted that Freaknik was time to dress in a way where your parents couldn’t find out.
By the early nineties, Freaknik became a mecca for rap and R&B music. The Rim Shop, a hybrid auto and music studio, became a meeting place for established and emerging artists like Tupac, Usher and T.I. It’s also when Luther Roderick Campbell, best known as Uncle Luke, the former lead singer of 2 Live Crew, brought his brand of freaky music to the scene. Groups like OutKast were made through guerilla street marketing: cassette tapes featuring snippets of new music were distributed to people stuck in their cars. The doc asserts that Freaknik reached its apex in 1994 with a perfect combination of music, fashion and good vibes.
The downfall of Freaknik began in 1996, as Atlanta prepared to host the Centennial Summer Olympics. As the documentary puts it, controlling Freaknik was a financial decision. While the celebration brought in millions for the capital city, the Olympic games would bring in billions. Police presence was heightened, and highway exits were blocked, making it impossible to get to the festivities, discouraging Black college students from seeking to revel with their peers. A name change was proposed, and the city started to call Freaknik the Black College Spring Break.
The doc doesn’t shy away from the darker side of Freaknik. Tides changed as more people, much older than the college crowd, began to attend the festivities and forget the manners they learned from their mothers, grandmothers, and aunties. Stacy Lloyd, a Morris Brown alumnus, recalls her harrowing story of attempted sexual assault at Freaknik in 1998. The doc stresses that the sins of a few shouldn’t speak for the many people who attended who were just having a good, clean time.
A planning committee charged with overseeing the festivities recommended to then-mayor Bill Campbell, who is African American that Freaknik should be shut down. By 1999, it was essentially over. Freaknik was resurrected in 2018 under producer Carlos Neal, and iterations of it continue today. But many in the documentary assert that the essence of Freaknik can never be revived.
In the hands of producers Luke Campbell, Jermaine Dupri and 21 Savage and crafted by Mass Appeal & Swirl Film, this documentary is a love letter to the heyday of Freaknik.
Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told is now playing on Hulu.
