Freaknik VS Mocha Fest

Freaknik is a Spring Break festival hosted in the third week of April each year in the city of Atlanta. This annual festival mostly attracted students from Black Universities all over the United States. The name FreakNic came from the word Freaky and Picnic. Started out in the early 1980s at Spellman University and by students from the DC Metro Club, Freaknic quickly became a massive celebration by the early 1990s, attracting hundreds of thousands of students from historically black colleges and plenty of non-students as well. What started out as just a picnic rapidly became what was called America’s most infamous street party. The annual gathering went from a single event to multiple events, to an entire weekend of parties, contests, concerts, love, lust, and everything in between. The bigger the festival got, the more out of control and concerning the image of the festival became for the city of Atlanta. There were several attempts made to rebrand Freaknik as a cultural event, however, no one cared. The people that came to Freaknik, came to get away from school and work and to flat out be freaky and have a good time. The city of Atlanta started making it incredibly frustrating and difficult to enjoy Freaknik by blocking off streets and implementing several other restrictions that would force people to lose interest in attending the event. That is exactly what happened, by the late ’90s after the Atlanta Olympics, Freaknik lost it’s allure to other Spring Break events until it was ultimately canceled by 1999. In 2019, an attempt was made to bring back Freaknik, but after 2 decades later, with so much more out there to experience, it’s hard to see this once extremely popular event recapturing its former glory.

Is Mocha Fest The New Age Freaknik?

Mocha Fest is a destination festival brand, hosting multiple annual events in popular vacation destinations all over the world. What started used as a single event for just over 200 people in 2014, has quickly become one of the fastest-growing festival brands amongst Afro-Americans and Afro-Caribbean natives all over the world. Like Freaknik, Mocha Fest promotes a carefree party environment, and the people that attend Mocha Fest attend the festival to party and get wild. However, Mocha Fest is a completely different experience from Freaknik. First of all, it is way more attractive to be on a beach in a foreign country acting wild than in your own backyard with people and students you see every day. All-inclusive alcohol, warm weather, and white sand beaches are more aligned with what today’s generation of students are used to. Speaking of students, one of the major differences between Mocha Fest and Freaknik is that the people that can typically afford a Mocha Fest event are more adults over the age of 25 that have full-time jobs. This means the party scene is a bit more mature and generally more respectful. The tourist destinations that Mocha Fest are hosted at, need the tourist business, so the visitors that attend the festival are welcomed and treated with appreciation. Mocha Fest does not impede or get in the way of anyone’s political agenda or bias, so people can party freely without malicious restrictions.

It is easy to compare the too events as both events are very unique and there is just nothing else to compare them to. However, while both Freaknik and Mocha Fest provides a space for carefree and judgment-free partying, that’s as far as the events go with their similarities. They are otherwise 2 completely different events that provide completely different experiences.