Shaped by early hip-hop culture, his documentaries put race in the foreground, whether the topic was hip-hop fashion, the Capitol riots or Louis Armstrong.
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.”
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