Dan Charnas
@dancharnas
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Author of "Dilla Time," NYT Bestseller, winner of the 2023 PEN Literary Award for Biography | WGAe | Order: | Events:
New York, NY
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Still stunned. More to come, but thank you to
@PENamerica
, to the judges for your empathetic reading, to my fellow nominees, to
@mcdbooks
,
@DavidDunton
,
@batnib
,
@walterspot
. It is so gratifying to see this book valued not just for the tale, but for the telling.
The 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography goes to Dan Charnas (
@dancharnas
) for DILLA TIME (
@mcdbooks
). Congratulations!
#PENLitAwards
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Corrine Bailey Rae? Erykah Badu? Tweet? New genre names are very often created to cleave black progenitors away from newer white artists who are then hailed as innovators. Watch it happen in real time!
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As I happily stream De La Soul's catalog, I am also furious that a landmark work of sonic pastiche had to be changed *at all* for release. It's an injustice that we've been tolerating for too long. It's time to make sampling legal. My piece for
@Slate
:
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This has been in the works, in many ways, before a word of the book was written. There were two things I knew for sure... /1
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Here’s the first official excerpt from Dilla Time, in
@RollingStone
, about how J Dilla became the Neo in “Neo-soul.”
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Some of you have seen this symbol on my Twitter page, and on the Dilla Time website.
On the penultimate eve of the release of Dilla Time, it’s time to talk about The Triptych, and what it means…
THREAD>>>
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Dilla Time.
The new paperback.
One week from today, Jan 31.
Preorder here:
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Name some food you tried because you read about it in a book or heard about it in a song. When I was a kid, Paddington made marmalade sound so good and then I tried it and was like yuk what the fuck is this shit? Don’t get me started on Men at Work and Vegemite.
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Now that "Dilla Time" is out in the world, it's finally time to tell my one and only J Dilla story.... THREAD
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I have been wanting to write this for *so long*. And here it is: The Dilla beat tape that, in my opinion, is his most crucial work. (And, no, all respect due, it isn't "Donuts.")
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Some people give and ask for things in return, keep score, make sure they get theirs.
Some people don’t. The latter group are quite rare.
Joseph Anthony Fiddler was a true mentor. He transformed countless lives with his generosity.
Thinking of all his people people today.
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The great gift of Dave and De La: by their example, they let us all know that there was room for everyone.
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I have no horse in the Dianne Warren -vs- The Dream stakes, but I hate hate hate when sampling/DJing is portrayed with the trope of poor kids not being able to afford instruments, as if electronic composition is a “make-do” behavior instead of being a distinct form of genius.
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Sylvia Robinson was the Mother of this business. But she is but the first of many important women in hip-hop. For my students at
@clivedavisinst
, and y'all, here are a dozen more who shaped this business (w/ page numbers from "The Big Payback"). /1
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“Sick of slang, sick of half-ass awards shows
Sick of name-brand clothes
Sick of R&B bitches over bullshit tracks
Cocaine and crack, which brings sickness to blacks
Sick of swoll'-head rappers with their sickenin' raps
Clappers of gats, makin' the whole sick world collapse”
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The institution most vital in shaping Dilla’s music wasn’t the strip club. It was the church. A Sunday thread: 🧵
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@RadioFreeTom
Tom, I have great respect for your work. And I understand you are arguing here for the possibility of maturation and evolution. Do you *really* feel the facts of his life thereafter bear that out enough to discount this violent incident? I certainly don’t.
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Introducing the official Dilla Time book website, with links to order the book/audiobook and, crucially, a Listening Guide with *every single song mentioned in the book, in order.* Want to guess how many entries there are on this list? The answer is…
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Dilla Time, now a finalist for the 2023
@PENamerica
Biography Award.
I write from a conviction that hip-hop is a fine art. But it still feels surreal that a book about the life of one of its geniuses is being received in this manner.
Today, this is for Dilla’s friend, Dave.
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Say Happy Birthday to "The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop," which turns 10 today.
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The hardcover arrived, beautifully designed by
@Rodrigo_Corral
. J Dilla always wore something that shined, and so I think this approach is so appropriate, don’t you?
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These posts of the Dilla Time book cover on social media? You’re seeing, in part, a community of people who did some amazing things over the years to uplift the work of J Dilla, and Dilla himself, who feel that they are a part of the story, because in this book they actually are.
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It’s hard to think of a more robust, dependable piece of electronic equipment than the Technics SL 1200.
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Man, listen, my 14-year-old is *cold blooded.* I'm listening to some random lo-fi beat and he straight up asks me: "Are you on hold?" Son.
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Funkenklein rang when Ice Cube came to NYC with copies of his solo LP: “Get over here and grab a cassette!” I raced to Red Alert’s, read the track list & asked, “WHAT’S ‘GAFFLING’?!” One of Cube’s boys snatched it out my hands. “That’s gaffling,” he smiled.
That was Coolio.
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Last week I told you about my first trip to Detroit, in 1999, to work with J Dilla. This week I’m going to tell you about my second trip, in 2008. On the eve of Valentine’s Day, a THREAD:
Detroit, A Love Story.
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Yours truly in new op-ed for the
@latimes
: "There is a more human reason that we now count J Dilla among the greats: His harmonies made people weep, and his rhythms made them feel free."
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Courtesy of
@TurntableLab
:
5 Incredible J Dilla Tracks That Still Ain’t Streaming (And Will Likely Never).
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On the eve of the release of the Dilla Time paperback, I want to thank Dilla fans in particular for the way you received this project, one year ago. A thread... 🧵
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If you are interested in reading about Andre Harrell's origin story, I explore it in chapter two of "The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop."
#RIPAndreHarrell
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J Dilla on the charts again. Makes me feel real real good. I’m so grateful for this community of ours: friends, family, and fans. He really was and is a miracle.
🥳🎉🔥🔊 DILLA TIME is an instant
@nytimes
bestseller at
#4
in hardcover nonfiction! Congratulations
@dancharnas
!
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The thing I will remember about Mister Cee the most, other than his kindness, was how difficult the world made it for Mister Cee just to be Mister Cee.
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Midnight Marauders over all the rest and that's me for life.
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I want to finish learning Spanish, and then German, master Yiddish, and then the most difficult one of all: whatever language Camp Lo is talking on Uptown Saturday Night.
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Reminded today that most people think writers are people who produce ideas. Writers are, more to the point, people who put ideas into words on a page. Having an idea doesn’t make you a writer. Having a story doesn’t make you a writer. Words on the page make you a writer.
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Fat Boys generally do not get enough shine, historically, but they were, IMHO, brilliant artists who helped shape hip-hop’s take on song structure among other things. This song is an absolute beast of performance and production, sophisticated and hard AF.
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Amp Fiddler, influential Detroit funk musician, dies at 65
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Don't forget, Dilla Time readers: There is an official Listening Guide on the Dilla Time website, listing every single song in the order that they occur in the book.
Read more... 🧵
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We need to stop demonizing copying. All creativity starts with copying, reusing, recycling. Whether we recycle song ideas or bits of sound, there is a way to regulate it so that creators can create and owners can get compensated.
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I’ve never considered hip-hop to be anything less than integral to understanding America over the last 50 years.
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Yep. The biggest misconception about funk is that it is simply a genre of music. It is, more importantly, a rhythmic concept that affected pretty much *every* genre of popular music. In that way, it is much like the term "swing."
The influence James Brown had on world music particularly in Africa and Jamaica is wild.
And it's wild cause those places were already funky as hell but once they heard Mr. Dynamite they got a helluva lot more funkier.
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Grand Puba’s instructions for a Happy Valentine’s Day, helpful if you’re at
@questlove
’s slow jam nite:
Step one: first you grab honey by the waist
Step two: then you move at a ghetto pace
Step three: then you look her dead in the face
Step four: now its time to leave this place
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Dilla Time has received a 2023
@ASCAP
Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Award for pop music. Many thanks to the judges, and to all of you who read the book.
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The Big Payback, the history of the hip-hop biz I published in 2010, tells a story beginning in 1968 and ends in 2008. But that story continued after my writing ended. The podcast from
@itsthereal
, The Blog Era, is the first comprehensive narrative about *what happened next*...
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An argument for inclusion over exclusion, addition over subtraction, nuance over narratives. If we're celebrating 50 years (and in many ways that year is right on target), let's not lose the actual factuals in an avalanche of marketing. /1
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Not a comprehensive playlist, but a start:
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Starred review for Dilla Time from
@PublishersWkly
: "The book’s heart is its rich, evocative musicological analysis, complete with rhythm diagrams... one of the few hip-hop sagas to take the music as seriously as its maker." 👊
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No better honor for "Dilla Time"—nor for me, the New Yorker—than to be selected by the
@LibraryofMich
as one of their 2023 Michigan Notable Books, alongside folks like
@jemelehill
. This one is for James, and
@Franknitt
, and
@T3sv
, and all the Michiganders who made this history.
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Thanks, y'all. This book is the product of 4 years of research and reporting, 200 interviews with family, friends, and collaborators. This project was motivated by three convictions: 1) J Dilla deserved a history
that was true and comprehensive...
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One impulse behind writing The Big Payback was guilt that I hadn’t been good at the business, and maybe I had something to learn from the people I profiled. But I look at their lives and deeds and values, and look at my own, and I think, man, I’ve got a fine life.
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2) Dilla’s core rhythmic innovation was not fully understood nor properly framed and needed a name; and 3) that digital sampling is an art form that deserves and needs the full protection of the law.
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I sometimes express the Dilla Time grid using the broken grid of Downtown Detroit. Why? A couple of reasons…
1. The map itself is a conflicted polyrhythm
2. It LOOKS like Dilla Time FEELS.
3. Dilla lived, as a baby, right there in that grid. He was born into it..... /10
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This is the Dilla Time grid. It represents Dilla's singular rhythmic innovation, combining several sounds—some straight, others in varying degrees of swing—and putting them in conflict with each other. /6
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If you're asking yourself why Preem's audio sounds so much better than RZA's, you haven't been paying attention for the past three decades.
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In advance of the pub date of the Dilla Time paperback on Jan 31, a short Saturday morning story... 🧵
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We need to reframe this issue right now, in hip-hop's 50th year. It is not good enough just to fight for artists' right to protect their creations. We also need to fight for artists' right to create in the first place.
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The minute I am in any business institution and the boss is talking about us as a “family,” I look at the front door. “Family” is often code for getting more work out of folks for nathan. Family is family and business is business, even if it’s an actual family business.
I worked in a lot of "we're all family here" places. I wouldn't expect one of those previous bosses to pony up my medical expenses 20 years later.
The music business is still a business. Even the for us, by us side.
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As an urban studies student, that America’s urban expressways have eviscerated cities is gospel to me. But these highway removal projects are happening now because they are good not for communities, but for developers.
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Though this particular gift will not arrive until February, you might consider giving the J Dilla aficionado in your life a preorder of "Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm." Order at this link:
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The takeaway: A group of beautiful men — partners, friends, mentors, protégés — figuring out how to respect and love each other.
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Those of you who read my lengthy works understand why they called me Shorty Longsketch back in my sketch comedy days at MTV.
Well, now you can call me Shorty Longlist.
So grateful for this honor from
@PENamerica
: Dilla Time has been nominated for their 2023 Biography award.
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This is a landmark day for supportive Jewish husbands of Black women.
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“Ultimately it’s really about me saying to everybody who loves Dilla: ‘You were not wrong. Your affection was not misplaced. He is special, more special than many of you all even know.'" — via
@nytimes
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Oh, no big deal, just Gabe Kapler, the manager of the SF Giants, holding a book.
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So many people to thank for 2022—everyone who wrote or spoke a kind word about Dilla Time, or featured it on your radio shows and podcasts, all of you. But...
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If you’re surprised by all this recent Twitter discovery of Bobby Caldwell being white, wait until next year when Twitter discovers that Bobby Caldwell is white.
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This is INCREDIBLE:
@TIDAL
recreated the actual song-by-song Listening Guide for Dilla Time — all the songs mentioned in the book, in order — for their service. Bananas. Surreal. And it made *me* utter the famous
@ElliottWilson
two-letter cry of celebration: "HA!"
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I hope y’all enjoy the book. Dilla is deep. You’re gonna find out just how deep that rabbit hole goes... /END
Order Dilla Time here, out Feb 1:
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As someone who chronicled the history of Okayplayer's early years, saw the site lose its way for a while, and then come roaring back over the last few years, this development is sad... but it is also a Lesson that reversals are always possible. Vive OKP.
welp, the
@okayplayer
editorial team is no more. Got a lot of thoughts for when things settle, but mostly just profoundly grateful to have been surrounded by such good and decent hearts in media for so long + all the great stories we got to tell together over the last decade.
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I absolutely know that some attorneys, good people who work in the field and have been clearing samples for ages, will disagree with me. Some will say it can't work. I want that debate. I welcome it. Because it can work and it should. Above all...
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Pablo Cruise>>Ted Cruz
J. Crew's>>Ted Cruz
Tom Joyner Cruise>>Ted Cruz
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Riddle me this: Why is it that when rappers do it, it’s called “lying,” but when Bowie did it, it’s called “art”?
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Once again, we see the power of good, ethical, indomitable journalism. Thank you
@dreamhampton
and
@JimDeRogatis
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Sending some upstairs, from Michigan Avenue to you, which really is not far from heaven, as you can see.
Happy 49th birthday, Jay.
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This is the real packaging of a product being sold at Urban Outfitters.
Love it.
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OK folks... well... it turns out we might have a nice birthday tribute to James Dewitt Yancey, and for the City of Detroit. Stay tuned...
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A life milestone for me.
The Library for the Performing Arts is hosting the New York premiere of a new doc on the hip hop group,
@LittleBrotherNC
on 11/15! Watch May The Lord Watch: The Little Brother Story, then
@dancharnas
, author of Dilla Time, speaks with the group.
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