The White Mandingos The Ghetto Is Tryna Kill Me

When Awl pal Sacha Jenkins was a teenager growing up in Queens, he was into graffiti and rap music and, more than anything perhaps, the Washington D.C. hardcore legends The Bad Brains. In the early '90s, with help from his friends Elliott Wilson and the artist and graffiti documentarian Henry Chalfant, Sacha started a music magazine called ego trip. Then he wrote for a bunch of other magazines, one of which gave him an assignment of interviewing Bad Brains bassist Darryl Jennifer. The interview didn't go so well. They didn't get along. "He was kind of a meanie," Sacha says. But through subsequent interaction they became friends. Hanging out at Darryl's house in Woodstock (not the Big Pink, another house up there) they eventually started their own band. And then got Los Angeles rapper Murs to assume lead vocal duties. And are releasing their first album in June on Fat Beats records.