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Boston Globe
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Sacha Jenkins, filmmaker who mined the Black experience, dies at 53
He was 'an embodiment of 'for us, by us,'' journalist Stereo Williams wrote in a recent appreciation on Okayplayer, a music and culture site. 'He was one of hip-hop's greatest journalistic voices because he didn't just write about the art: He lived it.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up And he lived it from early on. Mr. Jenkins, raised primarily in the Astoria section of Queens, was a graffiti artist as a youth, and sought to bring an insider's perspective to the culture surrounding it with his zine Graphic Scenes X-Plicit Language, which he started at 16. He later co-founded Beat-Down newspaper, which covered hip-hop; and the feisty and irreverent magazine Ego Trip, which billed itself as 'the arrogant voice of musical truth.' Advertisement Mr. Jenkins later served a stint as the music editor of Vibe magazine and wrote for publications such as Spin and Rolling Stone, before turning his attention to the screen. Advertisement 'There's a huge void, right?' he said in a 2022 interview with Okayplayer. 'There weren't a lot of documentaries about hip-hop for the longest time. I think hip-hop generated some of the strongest, most powerful storytellers of our generation with the music so it's only natural that we would create projects in the film and television realm that would have resonance.' He joined Mass Appeal, a New York-based media and content company, as the chief creative officer in 2012. Three years later, he directed 'Fresh Dressed,' a documentary that chronicled the rise of urban and hip-hop fashion, tracing elements of Black style from the antebellum plantations of the South to the world's fashion tents. Other notable documentaries included 'Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men' (2019), an Emmy-nominated four-part series that depicted the members of the groundbreaking hip-hop group from Staten Island as 'human-scaled -- determined, gifted, anxious, fallible,' music critic Jon Caramanica wrote in a review in The New York Times. 'Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James' (2021) explored the radiant and sordid career of the punk funk master, who minted anthems of debauchery including the 1980s hits 'Super Freak' and 'Give It to Me Baby,' but who also crossed the line from personal hedonism to criminal abuse. The film premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. Mr. Jenkins dipped further back into history with 'Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues' (2022), which drew heavily from the personal writings of the artist known as Satchmo, from his reel-to-reel audio diaries and from his letters, read by rapper Nas. The film shed light on the inner racial struggles of a jazz giant who generally kept mum on the topic while becoming a global celebrity beloved by white audiences. Advertisement Mr. Jenkins's films 'were homecomings for Black folk who watch these films with the hope that it's us behind the camera,' artist and writer DJ Lynnée Denise, wrote in an essay. She argued that his work stood in contrast to white directors Ken Burns and Martin Scorsese, whose documentaries about Black music 'replicate centuries of symbolic and material imbalance between Black performers and white industry.' Sacha Sebastian Jenkins was born Aug. 22, 1971, in Philadelphia, the younger of two children of Horace B. Jenkins, an Emmy-winning filmmaker, and Monart Renaud, a visual artist from Haiti. His family moved to Silver Spring, Md., a suburb of Washington, and after his parents separated, his father moved to Harlem and the rest of the family settled in Astoria. Mr. Jenkins came of age in New York at a fertile time in hip-hop culture, as it was spreading from such areas as the South Bronx toward the mainstream. 'We grew up writing graffiti, dancing in the street, rapping in staircases,' he said. People were 'plugging turntables into lampposts on the street.' He became enmeshed in the graffiti art scene, but, as he recalled in an interview last year with the multimedia company Idea Generation, he spent 'more time thinking about graffiti and writing about graffiti and publishing magazines about graffiti than doing graffiti.' After launching Graphic Scenes X-Plicit Language and Beat-Down newspaper, he joined forces with two friends, Elliott Wilson and Jeff Mao, to form Ego Trip magazine, which covered hip-hop and a variety of topics, including skateboarding and punk rock. 'White kids who like rock love hip-hop by this point,' he said. 'You can't keep putting people in boxes.' Advertisement In the late 1990s, Ego Trip expanded to books, including 'Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism!' which caught the eye of producers at VH1. The cable network enlisted the Ego Trip team to develop satirical shows including 'TV's Illest Minority Moments,' which lampooned the media's depictions of people of color, and 'The (White) Rapper Show,' a reality competition. Mr. Jenkins also published several books, including collaborating with Eminem on the rapper's 2008 book 'The Way I Am.' In addition to his wife, Mr. Jenkins leaves a son, Marceau, a stepdaughter, Djali Brown-Cepeda, and a grandson. Mr. Jenkins's tart views on race in America were on display in 'Everything's Gonna Be All White,' his 2022 Showtime docuseries that sought to tell 'a tale of two Americas, one white, one not,' featuring pointed commentary about racism from a broad swath of people of color. The documentary touched on the notion of a Black Jesus, the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, and 'white noise,' which Mr. Jenkins argued happens to people of color when they internalize messaging from the white power structure. 'It's a subliminal fuzz, constant, like a ringing in your ear,' he said in an interview that year with the film and television news site The Credits. 'It's always there, right, but you become used to it. If you focus on that frequency, it's going to confuse you, encourage you to make the wrong decisions, like not being conscious of casting folks of color in a film about folks of color.' This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sacha Jenkins Dies: Journalist Behind Wu-Tang Clan, 50 Cent & Louis Armstrong Docs Was 53
Sacha Jenkins, a hip-hop journalist and documentarian known for Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men (2019) and Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues (2022), has died. He was 53. Deadline can confirm the Emmy nominee's death after his wife Raquel Cepeda asked fans to 'please respect our family's privacy during this difficult moment' as they prepare an official statement. More from Deadline 'Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues' Uses Never-Before-Heard Audio Tapes To Reveal Complicated Man Behind Affable Public Persona Maverick TV To Adapt Howard Bryant's Book 'The Heritage' As Docuseries With Sacha Jenkins Executive Producing Mara Corday Dies: 'Tarantula' Cult Film Star & 'Playboy' Playmate Was 95 Born August 22, 1971 in Philadelphia, Jenkins launched the graffiti zine Graphic Scenes & Xplicit Language in 1989, and the groundbreaking hip-hop newspaper Beat Down shortly after. He co-founded the hip-hop magazine Ego Trip in 1994, which also launched the VH1 reality series The (White) Rapper Show in 2007. As a documentary filmmaker, Jenkins spoke to Deadline when he made his directorial debut at Sundance Film Festival with the 2015 urban fashion exploration Fresh Dressed. 'It's so amazing how there's so much love and respect for storytelling,' he said of the Park City, Utah film festival. 'Before I did this, I was a journalist, so storytelling is extremely important. And to see the dedication and respect that storytellers get, for me it's almost overwhelming how much love and support I'm getting. I'm like, 'Woah, it's not even about me. It's about the story, but thank you!'' Jenkins also served as a writer and producer on such docs as Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men (2019), Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James (2021), Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues (2022) and All Up in the Biz (2023). Jenkins is survived by wife Raquel, son Marceau and stepdaughter Djali Brown-Cepeda. Best of Deadline 'Poker Face' Season 2 Guest Stars: From Katie Holmes To Simon Hellberg Everything We Know About Amazon's 'Verity' Movie So Far Everything We Know About 'The Testaments,' Sequel Series To 'The Handmaid's Tale' So Far
