Sacha Jenkins, Director and Hip-Hop Journalist, Dead at 53

Sacha Jenkins, the hip-hop journalist, filmmaker, and historian who co-founded the seminal Nineties magazine Ego Trip, died on Friday. He was 53.

Rolling Stone has confirmed Jenkins’ death. Jenkins’ wife, Raquel Cepeda, told The Hollywood Reporter that the cause was complications from multiple system atrophy.

Jenkins’ output was multifaceted and vast. As a journalist, he started underground zines; wrote for and edited prominent publications like Vibe, Rolling Stone, and Spin (He was currently creative director of Mass Appeal); and profiled major artists across various genres. He penned several books, many of them focused on graffiti; wrote an off-Broadway play; directed several films; helped create a few VH1 reality series; and even played in a couple of bands. 

Jenkins’ parents were both artists: His mother, Monart, was a painter, and his father, Horace, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker who worked on shows like 60 Minutes and Sesame Street. Though born in Philadelphia, Jenkins was raised in New York City, moving to Queens in the late Seventies just as hip-hop was taking off — but also as punk music, graffiti, and skateboarding were epitomizing the city’s cultural epicenter. 

“It was very important for me to be directly involved, because I learn — from hip-hop, from hardcore, from graffiti, whatever,” Jenkins said in a 2024 interview. “Being a practitioner, being involved, or understanding these cultures and subcultures has always been very germane to my evolution. Having that experience really helped me navigate the world at large.”  

Graffiti, in particular, played a huge role in Jenkins’ early life. It helped bridge the racial and cultural divides prominent in the Astoria, Queens neighborhood where he grew up while also piquing his interest in art and politics. It was also foundational to his love of writing. While Jenkins did do some graffiti himself, he became more interested in thinking and writing about it. He founded his first zine, Graphic Scenes & X-plicit Language, in 1988, focused primarily on graffiti, but also featuring poetry, anti-Gulf War screeds, and music writing. 

In 1992, Jenkins founded Beat Down, which has been described as America’s first hip-hop newspaper. Two years later, after a falling out with his co-founder, Jenkins partnered with fellow music writer Elliott Wilson and the pair launched Ego Trip. Proudly proclaiming itself to be “the arrogant voice of musical truth,” Ego Trip published just 13 issues over the next four years, but left an indelible mark with not only its hip-hop coverage, but its unique brand of humor and investigations into underground scenes of all kinds. 

The Ego Trip umbrella would also live on after the magazine stopped publishing. Jenkins and his collaborators — Wilson, Jefferson “Chairman” Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, and Brent Rollins — would publish several books, including the seminal Ego Trip Book of Rap Lists, and spearhead a few television shows for VH1. The most successful of those was 2007’s The (White) Rapper Show, a reality competition hosted by MC Serch of 3rd Bass about the search for the next great white rapper. 

Over the next few decades, Jenkins took on a variety of projects. He co-wrote Eminem’s autobiography The Way I Am; worked on the television adaptation of Aaron McGruder’s hit comic The Boondocks; and with David “Chino” Villorente, created the Piecebook series, which collected early sketches from graffiti artists as they plot and perfect their work. In 2009, he wrote and produced a semi-autobiographical off-Broadway play called Deez Nuts: A Musical Massacre, about a journalist who interviews Queens hip-hop duo the Beatnuts. 

As a filmmaker, Jenkins produced a variety of projects, including the recent documentary, Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, and the upcoming film, Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos, about the notorious Cro-Mags bassist and frontman. He directed the 2021 film, Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, 2015’s Fresh Dressed on the history of hip-hop fashion, the 2023 Biz Markie doc All Up in the Biz, and the 2019 four-part Wu-Tang Clan docuseries, Of Mics and Men. 

“I named the film Of Mics and Men because the book Of Mice and Men is a quote-unquote ‘American classic.’ Well, guess what? The Wu-Tang Clan too are an American classic,” Jenkins told Rolling Stone at the time. “And all of the things that they’ve endured and have lived through, and have overcome, is a truly American story. And America needs to learn and accept and embrace the ugliness of America, and embrace the beauty that has always come out of black art, and black artists, as a reflection of and a reaction to that ugliness that we’ve had to face. And Wu-Tang epitomizes that on the highest level.”