Hip Hop producer Jermaine Dupri and Uncle Luke of 2 Live Crew recently sat down with Apple Music 1’s Ebro Darden to talk music, parties and strip clubs, according to Vibe. In anticipation of their new Hulu documentary, “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told,” the duo provided insight into what really went down at the height of the annual festival.
Freaknik started in the ’80s as a picnic for Atlanta college students who couldn’t afford to go home for spring break and grew at a reasonable pace until the ’90s. Back then, Luke was the go-to guy in Miami for “doing the freaky parties [and] concerts,” so he had high expectations when he attended the festival for the first time. However, he was left disappointed.
“I just thought it was a place to be,” he recalls, “and I ended up going there and it wasn’t that.” Apparently, the festival couldn’t compete with the clubs and events going on in bigger cities. He decided then that Atlanta needed a change, so he brought Miami’s party energy to A-Town, which included frequent trips to the local strip clubs.
Dupri, who can’t remember a time when Atlanta wasn’t the strip club capital of America, credits Luke for introducing the Black community to the industry after he started attending Freaknik in 1991.
“[Uncle Luke] was going to strip clubs before Black people. He actually invented Black people going to the strip club, and I don’t think in Hip Hop we ever talked about this, ever. He invented Black people going to the strip club in Miami.”
Luke confirmed Dupri’s comments and provided some context on what the industry was like back then.
“[There were] no [Black] strip clubs in the ’80s. It was only white strip clubs. Tootsies is the biggest strip club in the world right now. It was a little spot right next to the skating rink that I used to throw the parties at, and the bouncers took me over there and they were like, ‘Yo, you got to check this sh*t out.’”
According to Dupri, it took some convincing to get Luke into the club.
“He was like, ‘I ain’t going to no strip club, white bikers be over there. He said, ‘Nobody Black went to the strip clubs in Miami.’”
That may have been true in the ’80s, but it seems Luke had a hand in changing that over the years by creating an environment where the Black community could feel comfortable. By the mid-90s, Freaknik was one of the largest events in the south, at its peak attracting 250,000 people from all over the nation.
Read more about the Hulu documentary on Vibe.
