Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told’ on Hulu, A Fun Doc About Atlanta’s Notorious Spring Break Shindig

Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told (now streaming on Hulu), from co-executive producers Luther Campbell, Jermaine Dupri, and 21 Savage and directed by P. Frank Williams, traces the history and happenings of an outdoor party in Atlanta that started as a gathering for college students at historically Black colleges and universities – area schools like Morehouse, Spelman, and Clark Atlanta – and grew into a cultural force that put the ATL on the map as a Black Mecca. Of course, it could never last. But in its best years, Freaknik represented maximum fun. “The interstates. The highway. Nobody movin’,” Lil Jon says in Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told. “It was just the ultimate street party. Not on one street, but the entire city of Atlanta was a street party.” 

FREAKNIK: THE WILDEST PARTY NEVER TOLD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: “If you look at a Freaknik photo album from the ‘80s through the ‘90s, you will literally get a chronology of Black fashion and Black hair during that time,” says author, academic, and media personality Marc Lamont Hill in Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told. During a period of time roughly between School Daze and A Different World in the late ‘eighties’80s and Outkast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and Funkdafied from Da Brat in 1994, the event grew, grew, grew, until the whole thing was a destination event, and a traffic jam crossed with a party. Freaknik features interviews with the party’s co-founders – Sharon Toomer, Emma Horton, and Amadi Boon were HBCU students in 1983 when they first combined “freak” and “picnic” to form a place where kids who weren’t traveling for spring break could celebrate. It tracks the party’s expansion as it became an annual draw for Black young people from all over the country. And it addresses the city’s eventual clampdown on the event, which ties directly to the choices Atlanta’s leadership made as the city prepared to host the 1996 Olympic Games.

Campbell, Dupri, and 21 Savage are all interviewed in Freaknik, which also features commentary from Jalen Rose, Killer Mike, Too Short, Erick Sermon, Lil Jon, and Rasheeda Frost of Love & Hip-Hop: Atlanta, as well as context from scholars like Maurice Hobson and Ronda Racha Penrice and former Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed. And for most everyone interviewed, the feeling that Freaknik transmitted was fun in its purest and most unpredictable form. It was empowering to arrive in the area of Piedmont Park, the party’s traditional center, and find a free space for public expression fueled by youthful exuberance and celebration of Black culture. This was in the time before TikTok and everything else. Social media was instead driven by human contact, and at an event like Freaknik, promulgated by the prevalence of VHS camcorders, the footage from which dominates The Wildest Party Never Told.

Then came international attention on Atlanta, and increased friction between Black and White economic interests in the city. “The Olympics was great for Atlanta,” Legendary Jerry says in the doc. “But the Olympics wasn’t really great for Freaknik.” While the party had long since expanded beyond its Black college spring break roots, by 1996 the vibe was changing, with an element that brought disrespectful behavior and in some cases sexual assault. This evolution, combined with heavy-handed police tactics, ultimately shifted the energy of Freaknik. And while nostalgia drives newfound interest in a twenty-first century, sanitized version of the party, the wild times from way back when are what those who were there will always remember.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? There are parallels between Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told and Woodstock ‘99: Peace, Love & Rage, the 2021 doc that explored how an event that began as a hippie love fest turned ugly and aggro. And T-Pain voiced the Ghost of Freaknik Past in the 2010 Cartoon Network/Adult Swim animated film Freaknik: The Musical, which also featured the voices of Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, and CeeLo Green. 

Performance Worth Watching: Rasheeda Frost is a particularly entertaining interview in Freaknik. The businesswoman and Love & Hip-Hop favorite calls it like she sees it, whether she’s remembering the looks of an age before social media and enhancement – “No BBL, just all real, Black beautifulness” – or characterizing the controversies that came later. “Of course it was gon’ start coming with its problems. Because, shit, a lot of times these white folks don’t wanna see all these Black people out here kickin’ and havin’ fun like they doin’.”  

Memorable Dialogue: From Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell’s perspective, he had a lot to do with amplifying the party from the tone of its earlier days to the freaky vibe in its heyday. “In ‘93 it was a nice, peaceful party. People walking down the street, all this beautiful stuff. You got this innocent little Freaknik. Then you got this crazy motherfucker in Miami – me – doing all these sexually driven, wild-ass songs, and then you got these sexually charged-up college students. And so you add all that into this nice, beautiful city called Atlanta, with all these Black people, and it became a perfect storm.”   

Sex and Skin: The filmmakers are careful to digitize the occasional naughty bit, and the faces they’re to which they’re attached. (Original Feaknik attendees who are now parents, you’re probably safe from the crazy decisions of your past.) But Freaknik often feels like a highlight reel for the joy of wildin’ out, with late-’1980s proto-twerking, widespread car roof dancing, a discussion concerning the distinction between “Daisy Dukes” and “Coochie Cutters,” and ‘90s-era VHS footage of the scene inside Atlanta strip clubs.  

Our Take: “Really, them kids don’t know how it really was.” Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told is driven by nostalgia, but the sentiment takes different forms depending on the age and experience of who’s speaking. Original attendees light up when interviewed about what went down. How car culture played into the event’s draw and mystique – so much VHS footage of turquoise and pink Suzuki Samurais with the little SUV’s occupants absolutely bumping – or how Freaknik came with the assurance of industrial strength flirting and new definitions of sexual presentation. (Liberation for women in the space, and “expression without fear of backlash,” as filmmaker Anjanette Levert puts it.) For many of these folks, revitalized versions of Freaknik driven by interest from a contemporary generation of young people miss the point, which for them flows from the anything goes nature of the eighties and nineties edition. But it’s still nostalgia either way. Maybe 21 Savage has the most evenhanded take, from his perch in a time when social media can reduce everything to staged moments and performative antics. The 31-year-old Atlanta-based rapper says that all of the footage and anecdotes from the ‘90s Freaknik gatherings resonates with him “because they knew how to have fun. The world was way more, like, pure. It was something organic and real, and just for the people.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Stream it for the almost nonstop stream of wild VHS footage from a time that wasn’t really that long ago but looks so different from our own. Stream it for nostalgia, either as a veteran Freaknik goer or if you’re younger and looking for guidance on how to really party. But you can also stream Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told as a cautionary tale about how a city let its attempts at regulation run afoul of the gathering’s core intentions.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.