Marcus J Moore

Marcus J. Moore is an accomplished music journalist, editor, event curator and author of The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America, released in 2020 by Simon & Schuster. His next book, High and Rising, a cultural biography of the rap trio De La Soul, will be published by HarperCollins in 2024.

Marcus has been a contributing writer with The Nation and a founding editor of Bandcamp Daily. He writes features and co-leads the jazz-focused "5 Minutes That Will Make You Love..." series at The New York Times. Elsewhere, his music coverage can be found at NPR, Pitchfork, TIME, The Atlantic, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone, among other outlets. He has his own monthly column at TIDAL called The Liner Notes, where he writes about esoteric music and key figures from all eras and genres.

In 2021, he was an associate editor on the Smithsonian’s highly-publicized Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap. A year later, he was asked to curate an interview series for Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he conducted various hour-long discussions with noted experimental musicians Moses Sumney, Dawn Richard, Saul Williams and others. He has also worked with the Denver-based record club Vinyl Me, Please as its Hip-Hop Director.

Over the past two years, Marcus has released two albums — a compilation of obscure jazz and Black Liberation soul, and another of downtempo soul and gospel — for the indie label Paxico Records. He has created globally syndicated playlists for Google, guest-hosted live programs for Red Bull Radio, and conducted live interviews for Sonos, the Grammy Museum and the Kennedy Center. He writes extensive liner notes for vinyl packages, and has written bios for Erykah Badu, Jhene Aiko and Chance The Rapper, among many others.