Song of the Day: Solé, "Spell My Name Right"

Sacha Jenkins passed away over the weekend. He was 54 years old. I only met him once or twice in passing but as a white dude from the Connecticut suburbs who loved rap music, all the early ego trip stuff (particularly the Book of Rap Lists) loomed extremely large for me. He wrote about hip-hop with an incredible combination of intellectual skepticism and mouth-agape wonder. One of the greats to ever do it.

Jenkins spent most of the current century directing documentaries, but like all great men I admire he got his start in magazines. His biggest presence was at Vibe, where he was an editor-at-large, but he also contributed to Rolling Stone and Spin. His October ‘99 cover story about Kid Rock is one of my favorite profiles of any musician, largely because it engages Rock on a bunch of different levels and presents him less as a redneck polymath and more as an extremely savvy carpetbagger. It doesn’t judge, but it absolutely does.

That whole issue of Spin is a classic: It’s got the award-winning tick-tock piece about the flaming debacle of Woodstock ‘99 as well as a whole bunch of front-of-book profiles on a bunch of excellent artists who mostly became nothing. Those ranks contain Solé, a rapper in the Lil Kim mold who spit baddest bitch rhymes over turn-of-the-century computer funk dialed up by a then-upstart Tricky Stewart (who had only recently gotten on the map with Mya’s “Case of the Ex”; he would go on to produce stuff like Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)”). Solé never made much of an impression beyond some initial buzz, but her debut album Skin Deep is a rock solid batch of beats and rhymes. As someone who is always looking to flesh out my collection of late ‘90s rap ladies, I was jazzed to embrace Skin Deep and wouldn’t have found it were it not for this latest rabbit hole. Thanks Sacha, once last time.