After a recent announcement that Hulu was doing a documentary about Freaknik, folks of a certain age on social media began worrying what might show up on screen given that the drunken shenanigans were captured on old-school video cameras but not widely shared because social media didn’t exist in the 1990s.
On Friday on “The Tamron Hall Show,” seen locally on WSB-TV, legendary Atlanta record producer Jermaine Dupri, an executive producer, talked about the Freaknik documentary for the first time, explaining that “it’s not really a story about what everybody keeps talking about.”
Rather, he said “my vision of ‘Freaknik’ is really a story about the South in Atlanta.”
The documentary, tentatively titled “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told,” has no official release date yet. Freaknik began as a modest spring break gathering for Black college students in Atlanta in the 1980s but gradually grew through word of mouth into a massive party that clogged the streets of Atlanta and forced city officials to clamp down on its excesses during the mid-1990s. By the late 1990s, Freaknik was effectively dead.
The partying aspects of the annual event, Dupri told Hall, is not what he wants to focus on “because I feel like it’s a little disrespectful. I’m just telling the story and how Atlanta was built into the place that it is today. People came to Atlanta through Freaknik and they stayed. People would move, like I say that in ‘Welcome to Atlanta,’ people came to Atlanta for Freaknik and they stayed and that’s how Atlanta has become this multicultural, multi-city place. Freaknik played a big role in that period.”
Dupri, who wrote and performed the song “Welcome to Atlanta” in 2002 to praise his hometown, did add that “I can’t say that you won’t see freaking. It is called ‘Freaknik,’ it is what it is. It’s the 40th anniversary of Freaknik, it’s the 50th anniversary of hip-hop and it’s the 30th anniversary of So So Def,” Dupri’s record label that spawned acts like Bow Wow, Kris Kross, TLC, and Usher.
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