Charnas is the coauthor of Def Jam: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label (2011) with Bill Adler and Cey Adams. Work Clean arose from two years of research and over 100 interviews with culinary professionals. He is also the author of Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind (2016), exploring what great chefs can teach the rest of us about their particular way of relating to time, space, motion, and resources. The Big Payback inspired the 2016 pilot for the VH1 series, The Breaks. ĭan’s first book, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (2010) was called “a classic of music-business dirt digging as well as a kind of pulp epic” by Rolling Stone. For more information, visit the Dilla Time site at. Dilla Time has been called “one of the few hip-hop sagas to take the music as seriously as its maker,” by Publishers Weekly and “a new gold standard for writing about music” by Mojo Magazine. The product of four years of research and nearly 200 interviews, Dilla Time emerged from a course on J Dilla developed by Charnas at NYU in 2017, but its roots go back to Charnas’s time in the record business, when he first made the trip to Detroit to work with the producer then known as Jay Dee. A New York Times Bestseller, Dilla Time is the winner of the 2023 Pen/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and was named a 2022 Notable Book by the Library of Michigan, and made 2022 “Best” lists for Pitchfork, Vulture, Rolling Stone, New York Times, Financial Times, Amsterdam News, Spin, HipHopDX, Esquire, and Variety. Recipient of both a PEN Literary Award and a Pulitzer Fellowship for Arts Journalism, he is the author of four books was the co-creator and executive producer of the VH1 TV series The Breaks and is an Associate Arts Professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University.Ĭharnas’s latest book is Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2022). Dan Charnas is a bestselling author, award-winning music and business journalist, producer of records and television, and professor.

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