The Life Story Of James Dewitt Yancey

Every child is born with a special gift and James Dewitt Yancey was no exception. Before becoming J Dilla, one of the most influential producers in many musical genres, James Dewitt Yancey was just an ordinary boy with an extraordinary talent. By tapping into his musical talent at an early age, James Dewitt Yancey was able to experiment with different types of musical instruments until he found several that would transform him, his legacy, and music forever. James Dewitt Yancey followed his dream and as you read, you will learn how it all began.

WINNER OF THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER "This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius.” —QUESTLOVE Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century. He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, even though he worked with renowned acts like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu and influenced the music of superstars like Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson. He died at the age of thirty-two, and in his lifetime he never had a pop hit. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialized in symphonies and taught at universities. And at the core of this adulation is innovation: a new kind of musical time-feel that he created on a drum machine, but one that changed the way “traditional” musicians play. In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted childhood in Detroit, to his rise as a Grammy-nominated hip-hop producer, to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death; and follows the people who kept him and his ideas alive. He also rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of soul in Dilla’s own “Motown,” to funk, techno, and disco. Here, music is a story of Black culture in America and of what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new. Dilla Time is a different kind of book about music, a visual experience with graphics that build those concepts step by step for fans and novices alike, teaching us to “see” and feel rhythm in a unique and enjoyable way. Dilla’s beats, startling some people with their seeming “sloppiness,” were actually the work of a perfectionist almost spiritually devoted to his music. This is the story of the man and his machines, his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators. Culled from more than 150 interviews about one of the most important and influential musical figures of the past hundred years, Dilla Time is a book as delightfully detail-oriented and unique as J Dilla’s music itself.

“There has never been a better book about hip-hop…a record-biz portrait that jumps off the page.”—A.V. Club THE INSPIRATION FOR THE VH1 SERIES THE BREAKS The Big Payback takes readers from the first $15 made by a “rapping DJ” in 1970s New York to the multi-million-dollar sales of the Phat Farm and Roc-a-Wear clothing companies in 2004 and 2007. On this four-decade-long journey from the studios where the first rap records were made to the boardrooms where the big deals were inked, The Big Payback tallies the list of who lost and who won. Read the secret histories of the early long-shot successes of Sugar Hill Records and Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC's crossover breakthrough on MTV, the marketing of gangsta rap, and the rise of artist/ entrepreneurs like Jay-Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs. 300 industry giants like Def Jam founders Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons gave their stories to renowned hip-hop journalist Dan Charnas, who provides a compelling, never-before-seen, myth-debunking view into the victories, defeats, corporate clashes, and street battles along the 40-year road to hip-hop's dominance. INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS

How sampling remade hip-hop over forty years, from pioneering superstar Grandmaster Flash through crate-digging preservationist and innovator Madlib Sampling—incorporating found sound and manipulating it into another form entirely—has done more than any musical movement in the twentieth century to maintain a continuum of popular music as a living document and, in the process, has become one of the most successful (and commercial) strains of postmodern art. Bring That Beat Back traces the development of this transformative pop-cultural practice from its origins in the turntable-manning, record-spinning hip-hop DJs of 1970s New York through forty years of musical innovation and reinvention. Nate Patrin tells the story of how sampling built hip-hop through the lens of four pivotal artists: Grandmaster Flash as the popular face of the music’s DJ-born beginnings; Prince Paul as an early champion of sampling’s potential to elaborate on and rewrite music history; Dr. Dre as the superstar who personified the rise of a stylistically distinct regional sound while blurring the lines between sampling and composition; and Madlib as the underground experimentalist and record-collector antiquarian who constantly broke the rules of what the mainstream expected from hip-hop. From these four artists’ histories, and the stories of the people who collaborated, competed, and evolved with them, Patrin crafts a deeply informed, eminently readable account of a facet of pop music as complex as it is commonly underestimated: the aesthetic and reconstructive power of one of the most revelatory forms of popular culture to emerge from postwar twentieth-century America. And you can nod your head to it.

Celebrate the music that has shaped the culture and given us some of the greatest hits of all time with this vibrantly illustrated anthology, featuring 50 of the most lauded, controversial, and iconic hip-hop albums! From underground roots to mainstream popularity, hip-hop's influence on music and entertainment around the world has been nothing short of extraordinary. Ode to Hip-Hop chronicles the journey with profiles of fifty albums that have defined, expanded, and ultimately transformed the genre into what it is today. From 2 Live Crew's groundbreaking As Nasty As They Wanna Be in 1989 to Cardi B's similarly provocative Invasion of Privacy almost thirty years later, and more, Ode to Hip-Hop covers hip-hop from coast to coast. Organized by decade and with sidebars on fashion, mixtapes, and key players throughout, the result is a comprehensive homage to hip-hop, published just in time for the fiftieth anniversary. Enjoyed in the club, at a party, through speakers or headphones--the albums in this book deserve to be listened to again and again, for the next fifty years and beyond. Albums featured: Kurtis Blow (self-titled, 1980); The Message (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, 1982); Run-D.M.C (self-titled, 1984), Hot, Cool & Vicious (Salt-N-Pepa, 1986); Paid in Full (Eric B. & Rakim, 1987); Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, 1988); Lyte as a Rock (MC Lyte, 1988); As Nasty as They Wanna Be (2 Live Crew, 1989); Mama Said Knock You Out (LL Cool J, 1990); People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (A Tribe Called Quest, 1990); The Chronic (Dr. Dre, 1992); Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (Wu-Tang Clan, 1993); Black Reign (Queen Latifah, 1993); Doggystyle (Snoop Dogg, 1993); Illmatic (Nas, 1994); Ready to Die (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994); The Diary (Scarface, 1994); Funkdafied (Da Brat, 1994); Mystic Stylez (Three 6 Mafia, 1995); Hard Core (Lil' Kim, 1996); Ridin' Dirty (UGK, 1996); All Eyez On Me (2Pac, 1996); Supa Dupa Fly (Missy Elliott, 1997); Aquemini (Outkast, 1998); The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (Lauryn Hill, 1998); It's Dark and Hell Is Hot (DMX, 1998); Things Fall Apart (The Roots, 1999); Da Baddest B***h (Trina, 2000); The Marshall Mathers LP (Eminem, 2000); The Blueprint (JAY-Z, 2001); Lord Willin' (Clipse, 2002); Get Rich or Die Tryin' (50 Cent, 2003); The College Dropout (Kanye West, 2004); Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101 (Young Jeezy, 2005); King (T.I., 2006); Lupe Fiasco's the Cool (Lupe Fiasco, 2007); The Carter III (Lil Wayne, 2008); The State vs. Radric Davis (Gucci Mane, 2009); Pink Friday (Nicki Minaj, 2010); Watch the Throne (JAY-Z & Kanye West, 2011); Nothing Was the Same (Drake, 2013); To Pimp a Butterfly (Kendrick Lamar, 2015); DS2 (Future, 2015); Culture (Migos, 2017); Invasion of Privacy (Cardi B., 2018); Whack World (Tierra Whack, 2018); Eve (Rapsody, 2019); City on Lock (City Girls, 2020); Montero (Lil Nas X, 2021); Traumazine (Megan Thee Stallion, 2022)

In this innovative and intimate memoir, a daughter tells the story of her mother, a pan-African hero who faced down misogyny and battled corruption in Nigeria. Inspired by the African philosophy of Ubuntu — the importance of community over the individual — and outraged by injustice, Dora Akunyili took on fraudulent drug manufacturers whose products killed millions, including her sister. A woman in a man’s world, she was elected and became a cabinet minister, but she had to deal with political manoeuvrings, death threats, and an assassination attempt for defending the voiceless. She suffered for it, as did her marriage and six children. I Am Because We Are illuminates the role of kinship, family, and the individual’s place in society, while revealing a life of courage, how community shaped it, and the web of humanity that binds us all.

“Even the most avid music fan will make some new discoveries in these pages.” —The Current What makes a cult musician? Whether pioneering in their craft, fiercely and undeniably unique, or critically divisive, cult musicians come in all shapes and guises. Some gain instant fame, others instant notoriety, and more still remain anonymous, with small, devout followings, until a chance change in fashion sees their work propelled into the limelight. Cult Musicians introduces fifty beyond-the-mainstream musicians deserving of a cult status in genres from afrobeat and art pop to glam rock and proto punk. Weird and wonderful, innovators and boundary breakers, they include Alex Chilton and Aphex Twin, Bobbie Gentry and Brian Eno, Kat Bjelland and Kool Keith, Nick Drake and Nick Cave—and dozens more with a special ability to inspire, antagonize, and delight. Included are insightful profiles, discographies, and striking illustrations by Kristelle Rodeia.

From a Los Angeles hospital bed, equipped with little more than a laptop and a stack of records, James “J Dilla” Yancey crafted a set of tracks that would forever change the way beatmakers viewed their artform. The songs on Donuts are not hip hop music as “hip hop music” is typically defined; they careen and crash into each other, in one moment noisy and abrasive, gorgeous and heartbreaking the next. The samples and melodies tell the story of a man coming to terms with his declining health, a final love letter to the family and friends he was leaving behind. As a prolific producer with a voracious appetite for the history and mechanics of the music he loved, J Dilla knew the records that went into constructing Donuts inside and out. He could have taken them all and made a much different, more accessible album. If the widely accepted view is that his final work is a record about dying, the question becomes why did he make this record about dying? Drawing from philosophy, critical theory and musicology, as well as Dilla's own musical catalogue, Jordan Ferguson shows that the contradictory, irascible and confrontational music found on Donuts is as much a result of an artist's declining health as it is an example of what scholars call “late style,” placing the album in a musical tradition that stretches back centuries.