October 18, 2024 | 3:30PM
Fulton Recital Hall, Goodspeed Hall
Invisible Man: J Dilla and The Revolution in Rhythm
Dan Charnas
Author of Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2023 PEN Literary Award for Biography, 2023 ASCAP Deems Taylor Book Award); Director of Writing, History, and Emergent Media, Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, Tisch/NYU
The way both electronic and traditional musicians related to rhythm changed dramatically at the turn of the Millennium, owing largely to the innovations of a relatively obscure hip-hop producer named J Dilla. And yet musicians and music journalists struggled with how to language those changes, and musicologists didn't always have the context to understand the origins of the new techniques. This disconnect was the impetus for Dilla Time, a work of music journalism that attempted to add some needed nuance, language, and theory to our collective understanding of the rhythmic transformation happening in popular music over the past 20+ years. In this talk, author Dan Charnas delves into some audio-visual examples of those changes and his journey in reporting and writing about them.
About Dan Charnas
Dan Charnas is a bestselling author, award-winning music and business journalist, producer of records and television, and professor. He has written 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. Charnas’s latest book is Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2022). A New York Times Bestseller, Dilla Time is the winner of the 2023 Pen/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the 2023 ASCAP Deems Taylor Book Award. It won a 2023 Ralph J. Gleason/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Book Prize, 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. Dan’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. He has been a contributor to the New York Times, NPR, Billboard, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Financial Times and many other publications.