Tag Archives: hip hop

Friday Reads: Dilla Time by Dan Charnas

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Jo Mezger

If you’re a J Dilla fan, you probably know the tale of his last album. How he worked on his final album, Donuts, while in the hospital up until he died there. How eventually his health declined too much to use his fingers for very long. How he dictated to his mom, Ma Dukes, who held the sampling equipment at the side of his hospital bed.

 The story of his final weeks is becoming something like oral history, and 19 years after his death, details are becoming fuzzier. What equipment were they using in the hospital room? How much instruction did Ma Dukes need? Did Dilla know where he was taking the song or was finding the sound as he went? Where did Ma Dukes sleep? Which songs did she work on? Who else came into the room at that time? Did Dilla know he was dying?

The thing that makes that story so compelling—Dilla’s fervent love of his craft and Ma Dukes’s fervent love of her son—shines through at all points in Dilla Time. The story of the hospital bed and the swollen fingers and Ma Dukes fits the weight of decades into one scene. Dan Charnas does a careful job of telling Dilla’s story without losing that essence. He makes sure we can see that spirit of devotion in each detail.

Beyond the heartbreaking, you get to meet his Detroit crew, like DJ House Shoes and Frank’n’Dank, and about the artists from the coasts that sought him out like Q Tip and Erykah Badu. You hear about his most exciting collabs, like with Madlib and the Soulquarians. You get a good amount of information about Detroit culture, Hip Hop during the birth of the web, and TTP—Dilla’s rare disease. You follow the trajectory that Donuts had after its posthumous release and the trajectory of his legacy. Yes, you will learn what “Dilla time” means too.

If you’re a J Dilla fan, you’ll appreciate the treatment Charnas gives and the bounty of Hip Hop history he offers.

And if you’re not yet a J Dilla fan… Try some Donuts: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9dk_xtWpAkKXxzv_TfLWmlJj6G3quWQ2

Charnas, Dan. Dilla Time: the Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm. MCD. 2022.

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Friday Reads: The Deep by Rivers Solomon with Jonathan Snipes, William Hutson, and Daveed Diggs

Posted on April 18, 2025 by Jo Mezger

The Deep is a short and profound Afrofuturist read.

The wajinru are an underwater people who live peacefully together. Yetu is the tribe’s historian—she holds their collective memory so the rest of the tribe can escape the pain of it. Each year, Yetu extends the entirety of their history to the rest of her people in a ceremony called the Remembrance. It is the only day where she does not shoulder the burden of their gruesome history alone.

Her people, the wajinru, are the descendants of pregnant women thrown off slave ships crossing the Atlantic. The lore of their survival is detailed with reverence—the babies born in the water, the whale that mothered them, the infinite renewal of changing waters.

We meet Yetu at a breaking point. She did not ask to carry the weight of her people’s pain that is now driving her towards death. She flees in the midst of the Remembrance, leaving her people thrashing with their history. We follow both Yetu and the wajinru as they both find ways to deal with the trauma of the past.

Rivers Solomon was tapped to write The Deep with experimental hip hop group, clipping., made up of Jonathan Snipes, William Huston, and Daveed Diggs, after their group had put out a song with the same name in 2017.
Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EnPFsk4lOo

“Remember now or perish. Without your history, you are empty,” Yetu told them. “Everyone, shout this person’s name so they remember!”

Clipping. drew from the myth created by Detroit techno group, Drexciya. Their 1992 album, Deep Sea Dweller, and their subsequent recordings allude to a Black underwater utopia also called Drexciya, built by the descendants of the pregnant women who were thrown off of slave ships during the middle passage.
Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1zhZVisJxY

Hip hop and science fiction often find their way to each other to imagine a different Black experience. Key aspects of hip hop, like sampling and reference, intrinsically honor the past while creating something new. Solomon and clipping. fold their layers of reference into a percussive and evocative prose in a way that loses nothing.

Solomon, R., Diggs, D., Hutson, W., Snipes, J. The Deep. Saga Press. 2019.


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#BookFaceFriday “The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast” by S.H. Fernando Jr.

Posted on November 8, 2024 by Aimee Owen

Who is that masked #BookFaceFriday?

It’s your favorite #BookFace’s favorite #BookFace! Check out “The Chronicles of Doom: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast” by S.H. Fernando Jr.(Astra House, 2024). “MF Doom” was one of several alter-egos adopted by Daniel Dumile Jr., a prolific hip-hop artist that never appeared in public without a mask. It’s available as an eBook through Nebraska OverDrive Libraries, and is only one of more than 100 biographies and memoirs about musicians.

“Fernando provides a comprehensive look at DOOM’s life and career, meticulously researched through interviews with the rapper’s many collaborators and those closest to the man behind the mask. His track-by-track breakdowns of DOOM’s albums will have sample spotters diving into their record collections. A perfect pairing with Dan Charnas’s Dilla Time (2022), this is an essential exploration into the world of ‘your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper.”

— Carlos Orellana, Booklist (starred review)

Libraries participating in the Nebraska OverDrive Libraries Group currently have access to a shared and growing collection of digital downloadable audiobooks and eBooks. 194 libraries across the state share the Nebraska OverDrive collection of 26,898 audiobooks, 36,794 ebooks, and 5,133 magazines. As an added bonus it includes 130 podcasts that are always available with simultaneous use (SU), as well as SU ebooks and audiobook titles that publishers have made available for a limited time. If you’re a part of it, let your users know about this great title, and if you’re not a member yet, find more information about participating in Nebraska Overdrive Libraries!

Love this #BookFace & reading? We suggest checking out all the titles available for book clubs at http://nlc.nebraska.gov/ref/bookclub. Check out our past #BookFaceFriday photos on the Nebraska Library Commission’s Facebook page!

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