Sacha Jenkins, the renowned hip-hop journalist and cultural historian who co-founded “Ego Trip” magazine and produced TV series and documentaries about Louis Armstrong and Wu-Tang Clan, has died.
Variety has confirmed his death. Jenkins’ wife Raquel Cepeda, also a journalist and filmmaker, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that he died Friday morning at his home due to complications from multiple system atrophy.
Throughout his career, Jenkins chronicled hip-hop history in real-time, establishing himself as an authority in the space. He is largely considered one of the all-time great journalists with a fundamental understanding of both hardcore punk and hip-hop culture. Alongside journalist Elliott Wilson, he co-founded “Ego Trip” in 1994, releasing 13 issues and subsequent books including “Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists” and “Ego Trip’s Book of Racism” that led to the VH1 TV series “Ego Trip’s The White Rapper Show” and “Miss Rap Supreme.” Later in his career, he brought his storytelling acumen to a visual medium, executive producing documentaries on Rick James and Cypress Hill, and co-authored Eminem’s biography “The Way I Am” in 2008.
Jenkins was born in Philadelphia, spending his formative years in Queens, New York. His father, Horace Byrd Jenkins III, was a documentary filmmaker and one of the founding producers of “Sesame Street.” Inspired by the hardcore scene and the “New Breed” compilation, Jenkins borrowed money from his mother to publish his first graffiti zine “Graphic Scenes & Xplicit Language” in 1988. He made four issues of the zine before creating what’s considered the first hip-hop newspaper “Beat-Down,” where he served as editor-in-chief along with Haji Akhigbade. Around this time, he began working with Videograf Productions, a video magazine series focused on graffiti culture.
In 1994, he co-founded “Ego Trip” with Wilson, who had previously served as music editor at “Beat-Down.” “I wanted it to be more of a reflection of my life,” he told Bloomberg in 2023. “I like skateboarding, I like rock, I like hip-hop… I wanted something that was a little more contemporary to how I lived at that point.”
The “Ego Trip” team, which also counted Jefferson “Chairman” Mao, Brent Rollins and Gabe Alvarez, put out over a dozen issues featuring artists like Nas and KRS-One on the cover. They moved into publishing books — 1998’s seminal “Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists” and 2002’s “Ego Trip’s Big Book of Racism” — before teaming up with VH1 for a series of shows and series including “TV’s Illest Minority Moments Presented by Ego Trip” and “Ego Trip’s Race-O-Rama!”
After Ego Trip dissolved, Jenkins continued into the TV and film space, executive producing VH1’s RockDoc series “50 Cent: The Origin of Me” through his company Roadside Entertainment. In 2012, he became a partner at ad agency and record label Decon and was key in relaunching Mass Appeal as chief creative officer. His first feature-length documentary, “Fresh Dressed,” focused on hip-hop fashion, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015.
Along with Cepeda, Jenkins established the boutique production company Resurgent Pictures in 2022. The company, which develops and produces documentary, scripted and commercial content, has produced several projects including “The Walking Dead: Generation Dead” and the James documentary. In 2023, Resurgent partnered with Imagine Documentaries, which had co-produced Jenkins’ “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues.”
In 2023, at Variety’s Truth Seekers summit, Jenkins reflected on his successful film career and having the opportunity to shape projects about James, Armstrong and Wu-Tang. “They all had the same story, just different generations: They’re addressing America through their art,” he said. “And until America changes, hip-hop is going to be what it is — a way for many of us to take ownership of our identity. And I think that’s threatening to some people, but at the same time, America makes a lot of money from hip-hop but it doesn’t really honor it. But hip-hop is not black history — it’s American history.”
Jenkins is survived by Cepeda and their two children.