Jermaine Dupri, like many that hail from the Renaissance known as the 1990s, reflects on the significance of Freaknik, the iconic spring break event born from historically Black colleges and universities in Atlanta. In a chat with Chuck Jigsaw Creekmur, he acknowledges Freaknik’s pivotal role in shaping the city’s massive Hip-Hop and cultural landscape and the eventual emergence of Atlanta as the epicenter of the genre.
Executive Producers Luke Campbell, Jermaine Dupri, 21 Savage and director P. Frank Williams bring forth a captivating narrative called “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told.” The documentary delves into the Freaknik era, that started in the 1980s well into the 90s. Originating as a Black college cookout, Freaknik swiftly gained notoriety for its tales of spontaneous encounters, but eventually became a monster. At its zenith, Freaknik commanded attention, halting traffic and captivating the city, evolving into a cult phenomenon that young Black people had to attend.
The documentary features 21 Savage, Lil Jon, Killer Mike, Jalen Rose, Too $hort, Shanti Das, former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, Erick Sermon, CeeLo Green, Rico Wade, Kenny Burns, and more. JD discusses Freaknik’s indelible imprint on Atlanta’s cultural landscape and the world.
Story continues after video.
AllHipHop: What’s good, my brother?
Jermaine Dupri: What’s happening? How you?
AllHipHop: I’m good, bro. You’re in this new documentary, “Freaknik: The Wildest Story Never Told.” You were in the A at that time. You weren’t there all the way at the beginning of it all, but what’s your perspective on Freaknik as a legacy?
Jermaine Dupri: Well, I mean, I was in Atlanta. I just wasn’t of age 16. If you 16, that’s when you become a virgin to Freaknik. And like ’91, ’90, ’91 is when I kind of got hip to Freaknik. And Freaknik for Atlanta, and the culture of Hip-Hop becoming so dominant in this city and the city paying attention to Hip-Hop and the Falcons and everything. Freaknik created all of those avenues. What people were doing with Freaknik made all of the Fortune 500 companies pay attention to it. Like, “Damn, Freaknik is…okay.” You know what I mean? And if you took advantage of Freaknik the way I did with So So Def, you also realized that it was companies in this city, music companies that was putting out music. So I give Freaknik damn near 60% of the credit for catapulting the Atlanta South music scene.
AllHipHop: Wow, that’s incredible. Yeah. P. Frank Williams, the director, referred to it as a musical documentary. I never took it that way.
Jermaine Dupri: Yeah, nah, that’s what it is. It’s definitely a musical documentary that it’s also a Hip-Hop documentary. That’s another thing that people, I noticed that people don’t understand that it’s a Hip-Hop documentary that we haven’t had. Right. It’s a southern hip hop documentary, but we haven’t had a Hip-Hop documentary in the last 10 years, as far as I’m concerned, that brings the age group between parents and their kids as close as the age groups are now. And Freaknik actually deals with these younger parents and having these kids. And this was that generation where parents start having kids closer to their actual younger age…my mother had me when I was 16, so when she was 16. So that era of kids being born when their parents are 16 and this, that, and third, we never really had a documentary or anything, a Hip-Hop story or anything in the culture that actually that deals with that. This is the first.
AllHipHop: Definitely. Who do you think goes harder? Gen X, the freaknik generation so to speak, or the current day?
Jermaine Dupri: Freaknik generation. I mean, the inspiration and motivation behind five individuals at a school that didn’t have money to go to spring break or go home for spring break and see their family and they decide to create a picnic. And they didn’t just want to make it a regular picnic, they decided to make it a different type of picnic and put a different name at the front of it. And make it something special for the rest of the kids on the campus that didn’t have money to go home. That in itself is a story that when I’m trying to get things done and I’m trying to do it for all the money in the world, these type of stories hit me dead in the face.
Like, Jermaine, you got to figure out another way to get this done. You know what I mean? We live in a world where everybody always want to call and get as much money as possible, but if you really want something to happen and you don’t have no other choice, you’ll figure it out. And you don’t see a lot of that in this generation, but that generation did that, and to me, that’s motivation for me.
AllHipHop: Yeah, no doubt. You talked about Hip-Hop . Do you see parallels because parallels to Hip-Hop, because the way it started and the way it ended was completely different.
Jermaine Dupri: When you say parallels as far as what
AllHipHop: The trajectory, I mean, obviously if you start something off with a few people, they’re in on it, and then it just slowly gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then before you know it, it’s [massive]. Somebody I think described Freaknik as a monster.
Jermaine Dupri: Point. Yeah. Yeah, I did. So what happens is that at least with Freaknik, nobody was having a conversation. I think that was the thing. The city should have at least talked to the DC Metro Club to figure out what it was that they actually was doing. And then the city should have blocked off that corner of Piedmont Park where they started having a party, because now in Atlanta, this is where Music Midtown is held at in that same spot that she talks about having that picnic, that’s where Music Midtown is held, and it’s a situation where all these people come, it’s a festival, and it’s done right there. They could have done the exact same thing. They could have been the first group of people to have a festival, but they weren’t having conversation with the city, and the city didn’t go and make a move to have a conversation with them. And things just kept going and kept growing. And if you don’t have some kind of communication, things going to get out of control.
AllHipHop: Was it all business for you though? Did you have fun and did you indulge at a point at Freaknik?
Jermaine Dupri: Oh yeah, hundred percent percent. I mean, it was business for me from, I mean, not from a monetary standpoint. It was a business. It was a business move for me, fun standpoint. It was like when you getting your name out there and you’re trying to build your brand, you are more so concerned about putting your brand in front of as many people as possible as opposed to you making money. And that might be the wrong way to go about it. Somebody else might have a different way, but that’s the way I went about it. I just was like, and me being from the South and already getting flack for the crisscross record and people trying to treat us, we weren’t supposed to be in Hip-Hop in the first place. My determination was just like, I’m here. Y’all got to see me, and I ain’t got to come to y’all city. It’s 150,000 people in my city. They going to see me when they come here at least. That was fun.
AllHipHop: Yeah, we talk about the DC Metro Club and Erick Sermon is in there, and the impression is obviously this is a love letter to Atlanta, but also there were other forces that were convening in Atlanta at that point in time. Even myself, I considered moving to Atlanta in the nineties. I was like, yo, I felt like it was either New York or Atlanta ultimately. Yeah, I moved to New York, but it could have gone either way.
Jermaine Dupri: Yeah, I mean, well, like I said, this was the rise of Atlanta’s musical explosion. It was the rise while what I was doing. I don’t think the rest of the country was paying no attention to it. Erick Sermon is on Peach Street. Jermaine Dupre is in College Park. Dallas Austin’s in College Park, Rico Wade and the Dungeon family, they in the S.W.A.T.S., they creating something too short, move to Atlanta, move to the swats, and I don’t think people, and by the way, all this stuff is happening and Freaknik is happening. You got the energy of Freaknik and then you got this synergy that we putting out and we trying to put out records and we trying to make, so all the records and everybody just start connecting it to Freaknik and then the start playing the music. That was another thing. Then we got a radio station in this city once we got another radio station, hot 1 0 7 9, which was 90, what was it? At first it was something else. At first it was hot, something at first. And once they came and they started playing hip hop and they was playing, and the way that they got in was they was playing more music from here, more people from Atlanta. I remember when that station first jumped off, I used to have people saying, Jermaine, do you own this radio station? They used to play so many of my records because they wanted to brand it as the Atlanta radio station.
AllHipHop: Luke definitely brought a different energy. Obviously he’s from Miami, not to shade Luke or anything like that, but is that ultimately when things started to really shift into some of the other things that were not as communal, if you will?
Jermaine Dupri: Nah, because Luke was here before. He was at the parties before I was. Luke was at the parties that I couldn’t get into. So Luke actually helped Freaknik get bigger, you know what I mean? So he actually increased the crowd flow. So I mean, it could be a bad thing, but I look at what Luke did, he increased it and made it really like, and he put the freak in the word freak. The word freak didn’t have nothing to do with shake off and shaking your booty and Luke Skywalker, none of that. It didn’t have nothing to do with that. They was using the word freak from the Chic record.
AllHipHop: And I notably recall when all the exits were blocked off and you’re just in the highway. And that didn’t even stop nothing really.
Jermaine Dupri: Yeah, because what that did was it pushed you to the outskirts of Atlanta and where I’m from, College Park…all the way to Old National. So people was getting off on Old National and they was going to Frozen Paradise that was down the street on Old National, and then Old National became Freaknik. Oh, I ain’t got to go downtown. It’s right here in my hood. You what I’m saying? Like I said, Freaknik was amazing because you couldn’t really kill it. You couldn’t kill it once it was in the city.
AllHipHop: Oh, by the way, my niece worked on “Freaknik” as a researcher at Hulu. She works at Hulu. She sent a text to our group today and I was like, “I’m literally about to talk to JD right now.”
Jermaine Dupri: That’s dope.
“Freaknik: The Wildest Story Never Told” is out now and can be streamed on Hulu.