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 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.
