Latest news with #BigBookofRacism
Boston Globe
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Ed Sullivan emerges as a civil rights pioneer in ‘Sunday Best'
It's a lively pop history lesson, and a bittersweet one. Jenkins, a stellar journalist and filmmaker, erudite, comically barbed pop culture and race riff 'ego trip's Big Book of Racism,' he described himself to me as 'a big, scary Black man.' His other documentaries include the hip-hop fashion study 'Fresh Dressed' and 'Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues,' which, like 'Sunday Best,' looks at an establishment figure whose actions were more progressive than they may have seemed during his lifetime. Armstrong is among the artists we see performing on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' and its predecessor, 'Toast of the Town.' So are (deep breath) Ike and Tina Turner, Nat King Cole, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald … you get the picture. Sullivan famously had Elvis (in 1956 and 1957), and the Beatles, in 1964 and 1965. But he also had all of the above, and many more. Advertisement Every Sunday night on CBS from 1948 to 1971 Sullivan booked and championed artists he admired, regardless of color. This was a big deal, especially in the '40s and the '50s, but even into the '60s, when 'The Ed Sullivan Show' was sharing airspace with news footage of fire hoses and police dogs assailing civil rights protesters. As the doc explains, Sullivan got heat from CBS and from his major sponsor, Lincoln-Mercury, for his color-blind booking. Lincoln-Mercury dropped him in 1962; the company never came out and pinned the decision on Southern viewers' objection to Sullivan's booking, but that clearly played a part. Segregationists railed against Sullivan, who had the temerity to challenge notions of white supremacy. The doc also traces Sullivan's early life, beginning with his childhood in Harlem (then largely Irish and Jewish), where he developed a healthy distrust of racism. 'Sunday Best' leans into performance footage, which is a very good thing. Try not to get chills watching a 13-year-old Stevie Wonder blazing through the harmonica parts of 'Fingertips,' or the Jackson 5, with a pipsqueak Michael Jackson up front, jamming through 'The Love You Save.' Jenkins makes the wise choice to let many of the songs keep playing over footage that diverges from performance. For instance, the music from an early James Brown appearance keeps playing as we follow the story of how a young Sullivan, as a New York sports columnist, laid into New York University for benching a star Black player for a home game against the University of Georgia. 'What a shameful state of affairs,' we hear Sullivan say as the text of his column appears on the screen. Advertisement How, you might ask, do we hear him say this? This brings us to the oddest feature of 'Sunday Best,' and it takes a little getting used to. As onscreen text tells us at the beginning of the doc, 'Ed Sullivan's voice has been recreated in select portions of this film. His words have been taken verbatim from thousands of columns, articles and letters he wrote throughout his life.' It's a strange sensation, hearing a voice we know only from its public utterances speaking in more intimate tones, and how you respond probably depends on your feelings about the age of no-limits AI. The whole thing has a bit of a bringing-out-the-dead vibe. It bothered me at first, but before long I accepted it as part of the film's general landscape. It's an intriguing way to go right to the source, and it cuts down on the wall-to-wall talking head factor that drives so many documentaries. 'Sunday Best' can get dangerously close to anointing its subject as Saint Ed. The film has a single-minded argument to make, and it's not terribly interested in painting a warts-and-all portrait. But it makes that argument well, and with a head-nodding beat. The Motown connection is a sort of capstone for the whole enterprise; as we hear testimonials from Robinson and Motown founder Berry Gordy, still alive and kicking at 95, we realize that the label was tailor-made for Sullivan's mission of presenting Black artists to as many people as possible. It seems some civil rights trailblazers come in unlikely packages. Advertisement SUNDAY BEST Directed by Sacha Jenkins. On Netflix starting Monday. 90 minutes.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sacha Jenkins, Revered Hip-Hop Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 54
Sacha Jenkins, April 2019 () Sacha Jenkins, the hip-hop journalist and documentary filmmaker who co-founded the highly influential Ego Trip magazine, has died. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Jenkins' wife, Raquel Cepeda, confirmed his cause of death as complications from multiple system atrophy. He was 54. Born in Philadelphia in 1971, Jenkins was seven years old when his parents separated. His father, Horace Byrd Jenkins III—an Emmy Award winner for his work as an original producer on Sesame Street—moved to Harlem shortly thereafter, while Jenkins, his mother Monart, and his sister ended up in Astoria, Queens. While still in high school, he borrowed money from his mom to create the graffiti zine Graphic Scenes & X-plicit Language, and in 1992, Jenkins and his childhood friend Haji Akhigbade created Beat-Down, widely considered to be the the first hip-hop newspaper. Two years later, Jenkins teamed up with former Beat-Down music editor and TV producer Elliott Wilson to found the seminal hip-hop and skateboarding magazine Ego Trip. Other members of the editorial team included Jeff 'Chairman' Mao, Brent Rollins, and Gabe Alvarez. Though it only published for 13 issues, the self-proclaimed 'arrogant voice of musical truth' had an outsized influence on rap culture throughout the '90s and 2000s, eventually yielding the books Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists and Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism! The Ego Trip team also went on to produce several TV shows for VH1, including Miss Rap Supreme and Ego Trip's The (White) Rapper Show. Jenkins was the music editor of Vibe from 1997 to 2000, wrote for Spin and Rolling Stone, and co-authored Eminem's autobiography The Way I Am. His later career, however, was largely defined by his directorial efforts, among them the films Word Is Bond and Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues and the docuseries Rapture and Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men, the latter of which earned him an Emmy nomination. Until his death, Jenkins served as the creative director of Mass Appeal, a brand he'd helped to relaunch after becoming a partner at Decon in 2012. 'Being a person of color working on a platform that a lot of people have access to, it's important for me to say something every time I do something,' Jenkins told Pitchfork in 2018. 'For many of us, hip-hop is an identity, and for others it's a commodity that has travelled the world. People have made lots of money off it it, and also people have been very inspired by it.' How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement Looking back at the golden era of rap writing. Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
