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Steve Murray dissects what the Hulu documentary ‘Freaknik’ does and doesn’t get right about one of Atlanta’s most legendary parties.
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Two contradictory realities can exist at once. A dream come true can also be a living nightmare. And likewise, Freaknik, an event that crippled Atlanta, can become a catalyst for our city’s emergence as the metropolitan powerhouse it stubbornly and wishfully called itself for decades.
The Hulu documentary Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told captures this contradiction pretty well, but it doesn’t go in as deep as we want. It does take us back to those bass-thumping, rim-spinning years of the 1980s and 1990s, when Atlanta turned into a deafening party gridlock every third April weekend. (Yes, in days of yore, twerking was once known as “booty shaking,” and music was played on dashboard devices known as “tape decks.”)
Directed by P. Frank Williams of the series Celebrity Crime Files, Freaknik is an oral history from people who were either there from the beginning or joined the celebration along the way. The film’s talking heads include the event’s organizers, reuniting on-screen for a 40-year reunion. Back then, they were Atlanta University Center students who kicked off Freaknic (as it was then spelled) as an afternoon cookout for kids like themselves who had no wherewithal to take themselves elsewhere for spring break.
Spearheaded by Spelman and the DC Metro Club, the picnic took place in the then-seldom-used Piedmont Park back in 1983. At most, 150 folks showed up — far from the hundreds of thousands who flooded into town by the 1990s.
The center of Freaknik percolates with interviews from hip-hop royalty whose careers were intertwined with the party’s rise: Killer Mike, 21 Savage, CeeLo Green, Too $hort and others who reminisce and give perspective. Chief among them is one of the film’s executive producers, Jermaine Dupri, who built his So So Def label upon Freaknik’s spine. Pre-internet, dashboard tape decks were perfect platforms to market bands like OutKast through free sampler tapes handed out to drivers stuck in traffic jams.
Freaknik partly got its name from the upbeat, innocuous dance hit “Le Freak” by Chic. But Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell, one of the documentary talking heads and executive producers, put a lot of the “freak” into Freaknik — 2 Live Crew’s “Pop That Coochie” (its edited title) became the party’s unofficial theme song one spring.
“The first thing you think about is sex,” Campbell remarks, speaking of the age of the young adults who initially showed up. Rapper KP adds, “Luke is basically a soundtrack for what Freaknik feels like.” And Rasheeda, one of the Atlanta rappers whose career coincided with the Freaknik years, says, “The sh*t felt good; just be honest.”
Freaknik also charts how the namesake party grew at a time when the national Black profile was rising culturally with things like Spike Lee movies (including School Daze, filmed at Atlanta University Center) and the sitcom A Different World, which dropped a reference to Freaknik in one of its episodes, fueling national awareness of Atlanta’s big party. “Every piece of ground out here was covered, ” Dupri laughs, surveying Piedmont Park. “This is where the gumbo of Freaknik was happening. It was huge.”
As Freaknik grew ever bigger, there was a lot of pushback from Atlanta residents, White and Black alike. Yet that’s not what ultimately shut it down. Money did, as it usually does — particularly in the form of the Olympics organizers and businesspeople whose profitable Atlanta conventions were jeopardized.
Shutdown or not, the documentary reminds us that our city milestones — such as the election of Atlanta’s first Black mayor, the development of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport and the securing of the Olympic Games — helped turn Atlanta into the long-hoped dream of itself. And the doc convincingly argues that Freaknik, in its own way, was a shaggy Trojan horse smuggling in newcomers who saw the city’s cultural value, came to stay and upped Atlanta’s game, especially the music scene. In the end, the event may have been as vital a part of Atlanta’s development.
Freaknik works well as a time capsule. The film is a you-can’t-go-back recapturing of a long-gone Atlanta, long-gone technologies and long-ago youth for those of us who celebrated and survived that yearly ritual. But Freaknik doesn’t deliver the schadenfreude of the dual documentaries that chronicled the Fyre Festival disaster, and it can’t deliver the uplift of Questlove’s resurrection job with Summer of Soul. That was a contained, fantastic concert, while Freaknik was a free-floating vibe. “If you ain’t experienced Freaknik, you don’t know how to treat Freaknik,” Dupri scoffs at recent attempts to brand and revive the event. “You can’t just buy the name.”
And even if those old party weekends were preserved on hundreds of camcorders, Freaknik was something that happened in the moment. It was live, even if those live moments were stranded in a traffic jam. “We weren’t worried about likes; we weren’t worried about follows,” former NBA player Jalen Rose says. “Now, with social media, I don’t think [Freaknik] could exist.”
If Freaknik were a course taught in film, it would be a decent 101 introduction class. Williams’ documentary hits the highlights, such as the party’s beginnings, expansion, sexual liberation, Black freedom, economic and musical impacts, community tensions, crimes and ultimate decline. But the film’s brief 82-minute running time and its hopscotch structure — skipping constantly from one subtopic to the next — makes you wish it had taken a longer, multichapter form. For now, it would make a good double feature with the Horne Brothers’ The South Got Something to Say, their overview of Atlanta hip-hop, which is a large subtopic of the Hulu documentary and is available to stream for Atlanta Journal-Constitution subscribers.
On a personal note, back then, I lived two streets from Piedmont Park. One Saturday morning — it would have been one of the Freakniks many people consider the best, either 1993 or 1994 — I was walking through the park to go for a workout at a gym; I knew driving was a no-go. As I walked through the thick, exuberant crowd, one young man peeled away from his friends and stopped me in my tracks with what I think was meant to be a challenging glare. “Bet you’ve never seen this many Black people in one place,” he said.
I had to laugh. “Well, yeah I have,” I said. “This is Atlanta, and I live here.”
The out-of-towner seemed to come up short for a second, then he laughed, too, and rejoined his friends. At that moment, I understood what Freaknik represented for people living in other cities: a lovely, sometimes tense but always creative, mix of people and ideas.
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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming columns here.
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