Sacha Jenkins, a fiery journalist and documentary filmmaker who strove to tell the story of Black American culture from within, whether in incisive prose explorations of rap and graffiti art or in screen meditations on Louis Armstrong, the Wu-Tang Clan or Rick James, died on May 23 at his home in the Inwood section of Manhattan. He was 53.
The death was confirmed by his wife, the journalist and filmmaker Raquel Cepeda-Jenkins, who said the cause was complications of multiple system atrophy, a neurodegenerative disorder.
Whatever the medium — zines, documentaries, satirical television shows — Mr. Jenkins was unflinching on the topic of race as he sought to reflect the depths and nuances of the Black experience as only Black Americans understood it.
He was “an embodiment of ‘for us, by us,’” the 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.”
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.”
Mr. Jenkins went on to serve a stint as the music editor of Vibe magazine, and to write for publications like Spin and Rolling Stone, before turning his attention to the screen to tell the stories of urban America for which he had become known.
In his view, someone had to. “Well, you know, 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.”
Mr. Jenkins 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, with commentary by the likes of Pharrell Williams; Sean Combs, then known as Puffy; and the Vogue creative director André Leon Talley.
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,” the 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 like 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 and aired on Showtime.
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, as well as his letters, read by the 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.
Mr. Jenkins’s films “were homecomings for Black folk who watch these films with the hope that it’s us behind the camera,” DJ Lynnée Denise, an artist and writer who explores topics like the music of the African diaspora, wrote in an essay. She argued that Mr. Jenkins’s work stood in contrast to white directors like 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 on Aug. 22, 1971, in Philadelphia, the youngest 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. He went on to graduate from William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens in 1990.
Mr. Jenkins came of age in New York at a fertile time in hip-hop culture, as it was spreading from areas like the South Bronx toward the mainstream. “We grew up writing graffiti, dancing in the street, rapping in staircases,” Mr. Jenkins once said. People were “plugging turntables into lampposts on the street.”
Mr. Jenkins 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.”
He started Graphic Scenes X-Plicit Language with $1,000 that he borrowed from his mother, he said, and sold about 5,000 copies of his first issue.
He later partnered with a friend, Haji Akhigbade, to create Beat-Down newspaper, but eventually concluded that the world did not need another hip-hop publication.
Instead, he joined forces with two friends, Elliott Wilson and Jeff Mao, to form Ego Trip magazine, which covered a wider 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.”
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 like “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’s survivors include 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 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.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
The post Sacha Jenkins, Filmmaker Who Mined the Black Experience, Dies at 53 appeared first on New York Times.
