A Rising Fall (CITY: A Literary Concerto Book 1)

Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain by Robert Hewison review – a Faustian pact

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Here, he is not analysing cultural history so much as advancing a case. The argument is that, after 20 years of Thatcherite parsimony, the New Labour government offered the arts a Faustian pact. This strategy, Hewison argues, contributed to the catastrophe of the Millennium Dome, created a mountain of papers, proposals and reports one, on the DCMS itself, titled The pale yellow amoeba , and provoked the Arts Council into a merry-go-round of frantic reorganisation from devolution to regional arts boards, via recentralisation, back to devolution again , while such projects as the Public in West Bromwich and the Sheffield Centre for Popular Music foundered.

Welcomed by artists, the anti-instrumentalist turn was shortlived. By , the DCMS budget will be half as large as in Finally, Hewison notes, the central New Labour objective of widening social access to the arts has not succeeded. Through the 00s, the DCMS and its clients had commissioned increasingly sophisticated surveys of arts participation and attendance. However, researchers noted that the And all researchers agreed that the arts audience remained stubbornly whiter, older and more educated than the general population. But the ambition to widen access to the arts had failed.

There are a couple of caveats.

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Freaknik: Rise and fall of Atlanta's most infamous street party

It was almost like a festival with the concerts—different people were doing different things. But it was never rounded up like a Lollapalooza. If you were an artist promoting any product, it was a great place to party, to promote new music. You could go and meet a lot of beautiful women. It was an event you just had to be at. It was the heyday of LaFace Records. The Dirty South was really starting to come into its own. Freaknik was ratchet before ratchet was a word. Once it grew, everybody saw it as a money-making opportunity. Freaknik was a good time to book a show because you knew it was going to be packed.

Everybody knows a good weekend.

Club owners, promoters knew during Freaknik you were gonna make money. So different venues would do stuff on their own to make money. On Saturday at Lenox, you could see every artist there. I remember going down the escalator and the guys from Boyz II Men were harmonizing on the escalator going into the food court! It was gigantic for the malls. This was when a lot of record labels were talking about designers for the first time.

People were going out and buying those things, wearing them in the videos. It was all moving in tandem with the music and the scene at that time. I was driving during this whole era.

Freaknik: The rise and fall of Atlanta’s most infamous street party

I wanted to get in my Range Rover and drive. I was driving and people knew her because she was on TV and it was like the craziest shit in the world!

Being the owner of my record label, I could monitor record sales. We would look for events like Freaknik to be a part of. While the music business profited, others saw Freaknik as a liability. In April , restaurants announced plans to close, and some hotels refused to take reservations. Some residents and businesses formed the Freaknik Fallout Group and threatened to sue the city.

There were a couple of conventions taking place. They said their guests would never come back. APD and state troopers implemented an aggressive traffic control plan, blocking highway exits and setting up barricades in popular cruising areas. Campbell and his police chief, Beverly Harvard, enlisted the AUC college presidents to send letters to their peers at schools, asking them to discourage students from attending.

This thwarted some, but hardly all.

On the third weekend in April, , partyers arrived. The city made things worse. By , you had the airport locked up. People were coming from everywhere. So the tone of Freaknik started to change. Things that went on in strip clubs were spilling out into the streets. Even Mardi Gras is more controlled. I came home a couple of times from college to go to Freaknik. I met up with some friends and drove from D.

It changed more and more as I came back. It got worse and worse and worse in terms of the behavior and what [the city] could manage. It got further and further away from college. I was on the Connector; it was super congested. In front of me were these girls riding in a really shiny, fancy car. They were all dressed in the Freaknik outfits of the day—the tight denim shorts. They were lounging like they were sunbathing. Their hair was all done perfect, real pretty girls.

They were just the picture of Freaknik—the way the AJC wanted us to frame it. An ambulance came up behind me, and I immediately started trying to move my car over. Right then, I turned on Freaknik. I thought it was something we were tolerating—that the city, or somebody, needed to get under control. But after that I saw it differently. I remember dreading it. I remember being at that BP station next to the West End mall, hanging out in the car, and hearing gunshots ring out and the cars speed by and everybody running for cover.

Something like that will stay with you forever. Later that night, there were reports of a group going to Underground and breaking into the Nike store. Freaknik wrapped up with grim reports. The rape unit at Grady Memorial Hospital treated 10 victims—far more than in a typical weekend. Police made at least 93 arrests and revelers looted stores in Underground Atlanta and Greenbriar Mall. Three people were shot. In April , Freaknik became a dry run for Olympics traffic control.

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APD put 1, officers on hour shifts, and the city tested its high-tech traffic system. The Georgia Emergency Management Agency opened up its command center, and Georgia National Guard troops drilled at metro-area armories. Freaknik had to be ended. It had to go. That had nothing to do with the solid, good intent of Freaknik. Anyone over the age of 22 had no business at Freaknik.

Markel Hutchins was a student at Morehouse College from to He is currently a minister and activist living in Atlanta. By the time I got to Morehouse, especially after my second year, it had really turned into a dramatic display of debauchery that undermined the very essence of what the AUC schools meant for this community and really for the nation. The city finally came up with a way to frustrate the students to the point where they did not want to come back.

Once they started managing it the way they did, it took away a lot of the fun of when it was a big crowd. A lot of people came for the stopping in traffic, partying, meeting people in the street. It was sort of pointless after that. Whenever you take a group of people that want to cruise the streets in a certain pattern, when you disrupt the pattern; that makes it less fun.

I think it does naturally kill the vibe.

We were rocking Polo, Tommy Hilfiger. We had money to spend! Another strategy was to close surface streets, or to make some streets one-way only. The city also tried to work with students to organize programs like job fairs, adding a sheen of respectability.

Suzanne crafted a sponsorship and offered it to Coca-Cola. But the city did not go for it. A website with information for would-be attendees. The city again tried to re-brand the gathering as Black College Spring Break.

See a Problem?

Others seized the idea of getting into still-nascent cyber promotion. A commercial site, freaknik. Freaknik drew near and antsy Atlantans had another cause for concern: Rumors of a bomb threat. The event itself was deemed dull.

Partiers stayed away and police patrolled aggressively. Two incidents exacerbated race and class tensions.

On Freaknik weekend, a young Atlanta father, Timmie Sinclair, was stopped by cops after going through a Freaknik traffic barricade. Sinclair said other police told him to go through, as he was heading out to get medicine for his child. In his bestseller A Man In Full , journalist and social observer Tom Wolfe opened with a scene set in Freaknik, that, like the rest of his novel, highlighted racial and economic tensions in Atlanta.

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