Image via Marcus J. Moore/Twitter
When De La Soul announced they were planning a special tribute concert in honor of the late Dave “Trugoy The Dove” Jolicoeur, I was at the office and told all my coworkers that there was no way I wasn’t going. The show was dubbed The DA.I.S.Y. Experience and would be held at Webster Hall on March 2, 2023. I was still feeling heavy-hearted every time I’d hear a De La track, and figured this would be the perfect opportunity for family, friends, and fans like me to show our shared appreciation for Dave, Posdnuos, and Maseo. After a decades-long dispute with their former label, Tommy Boy, De La Soul had finally acquired the rights to their masters.
That excitement turned to distress when I learned only 333 tickets would be available to the public. On the morning of March 1, all tickets were spoken for in less than a minute, leaving me and countless other hopefuls devastated that they would have to settle for watching the tribute on Twitch.
Later that day, I was chatting with someone I’d connected with after selecting a ticket to the listening session for And the Anonymous Nobody… as my reward for contributing to the Kickstarter in 2015. He asked if I was going to the show. When I told him that I didn’t have a ticket, he offered me his +1. I was overwhelmed and profoundly grateful. When I asked, “But why me?” he said that outside of his connections in the industry, he’d never met anyone who loved hip-hop as much as I do.
I still have so many memories from that night, from the floor to ceiling daisy decorations to watching Queen Latifah and everyone’s favorite hypewoman Monie Love perform “Ladies First” and “U.N.I.T.Y.” and an unexpected marathon of a freestyle from Black Thought. But nothing compared to hearing Dave Chappelle count down the last remaining seconds to midnight when dozens of daisy-shaped balloons fell from the ceiling to celebrate the availability of De La’s first six studio albums on streaming services.
When I found out a well-respected journalist was writing the first biography on the group at the end of 2023, I felt that same excitement over the opportunity to immerse myself in their story once again. Only this time, it would be from the lens of a lifelong fan like me. Marcus J. Moore had already started thinking about High and Rising: A Book About De La Soul before his first book, The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America, was published in 2020.
High and Rising started off as a biography about one of the first hip-hop groups that Moore related to in a real way–quickly, he found a need to weave his own narrative into that of De La’s. The book is dedicated to his late mother who passed not long before the completion of the text. Moore announced plans for the book’s release on Instagram in November of 2024: “High and Rising marks a period of change for all of us. It’s about De La, me, my mother and my family. It’s about grief, creative ingenuity, joy, and normalcy. It’s about life and the music and people we love.”
Despite De La, and many of their fans, expressing displeasure in how the release of High and Rising was handled, Moore has received praise from fellow journalists and well-respected artists in the industry. Phonte Coleman, Grammy nominated singer, rapper, and producer of Little Brother and The Foreign Exchange called it “a love letter to one of the greatest rap groups of all time.”
In tandem, Rolling Stone included High and Rising in the list of “The Best Music Books of 2024” saying, “Unfortunately, the surviving members of De La Soul…didn’t seem to appreciate Moore’s reverence and disavowed the book as ‘unauthorized.’ Authorized or not, High and Rising is a must-read for fans of the group and Nineties hip-hop.”
My conversation with Moore, lightly edited for content and clarity, follows below. – Lara Gamble
My first question is always, “What’s your earliest memory of hip-hop?” but I’m going to customize it to make sense in the context of this interview and ask, “What’s your earliest memory of De La Soul?”
Marcus J. Moore: It had to be 1989. I was looking at music videos because that’s just what I did as a kid. I was an MTV kid. So, I’m looking at a video channel. “The Potholes in My Lawn” video came on, and I just remember the sort of grainy 8mm film and how the beat just kind of stumbled out of the TV. And these guys, they’re not just rapping. You remember hip-hop back then with like LL and Rakim who were gonna rap your face off…in a good way. Whereas with De La, I felt like they were just kind of talking to me. Yeah, I wanna say that was my earliest memory of being like, “Who are these guys?” And then, I believe right after that was when I saw the “Me Myself & I” video, and that video was so crazy that the group just stuck in my head.
I read High and Rising as both a cultural biography and a dissection of De La Soul’s journey from a devoted fan’s point of view. At the start, we catch glimpses of your childhood, and while I know it doesn’t show up until later in the book, I enjoyed reading about your desire at one time to become an emcee. I have so many questions about that, but I’m most interested in hearing how the artists you were introduced to in the late 80s helped expand your definition of what good music should sound like.
Marcus J. Moore: Well, in particular, De La Soul was the strongest representation of that because they showed me that you could sample beyond James Brown and old soul music. De La Soul showed that you can put a Hall & Oates vocal sample with Steely Dan. You can have your album title reference Bob Dylan but then also have the album artwork reference Parliament-Funkadelic and Sly Stone.
So, De La Soul is the strongest example of that, but I also gotta give a lot of credit to Public Enemy as well because I was also a huge fan of theirs. Their approach was similar because it was also a patchwork collage of this sound and that sound, and they’re just mashing it all up. And it may sound crazy, but it actually makes sense when you throw it all together.
My two biggest examples, I think, are De La Soul and Public Enemy but also a subtle hat tip to A Tribe Called Quest because I remember when the “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” video came out and being like, “Okay, that’s a weird title. What’s that about?” And then also “Bonita Applebum” – hearing that too. So, those are the Top 3 if you’re looking at the Venn diagram of who Marcus is. It’s definitely De La meets Public Enemy meets A Tribe Called Quest in a real way.
De La’s subtle style had an effect on your fashion choices early on. How did their “quiet luxury” influence your personal aesthetic back then?
Marcus J. Moore: Growing up, I didn’t necessarily have the money to buy all the Troop jackets. I don’t think Jordans were a whole lot back then, but I didn’t have the money to just buy the Top Flite stuff. I had to make due with what I had. So, if I had one Polo shirt, I had to make it last all school year. If I had one pair of shoes, I had to make it last all school year.
So, what their sort of subtlety showed me is that you can still look fly, and you can still be cool but not have on the Diadoras or have on the velour jumpsuit or the Jordaches or whatever. You didn’t have to have on all the Top Flite things to be cool. And I still carry that with me now. I’m not gonna be the dude that has the Top Flite fashion, but I’ll get something that possibly no one’s ever seen, and I’ll throw it together and try to make it work in that way. I would say that’s not so much a direct call back to De La Soul. It’s also more of a call back to, quite honestly, just not really having it like that growing up and not having the money to just get what I wanted.
So, that just sort of stuck with me. I could go get the Jordans now, but maybe I want to get the fly shoes nobody has and nobody’s ever seen. I don’t wanna get something that has the branding across the front of the hat. Let me just get something subtle. I feel like their aesthetic also kind of helped keep money in my pocket in a way because I don’t really have the money to be doing all the stuff that everybody else is doing. And, you know, now as an adult, I find I don’t have to do that, and I’m still okay.
You share about the first time you “felt othered” around the age of ten when you were expected to excel in the ‘talented and gifted’ program at school but were more focused on how music made you feel at a time when you were being introduced to rap music. Would you say your disruptive routine during that time had you leaning into mood music more?
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, probably. I would say so because I guess my disruptive streak was no different from any other kid that’s trying to figure it out. But my situation was a little bit different because growing up as a talented and gifted kid around a time when talented and gifted was a thing in the education system, it was easy to feel othered.
I also came up right when busing was a thing and desegregation in schools. Busing in the 80s was a thing. So, even though I grew up in a neighborhood that had pretty much nothing but black people in it, I’m hopping on a bus and going to another side of town. And all of a sudden, I’m seeing white kids. I knew that at a certain point I was going to be having “regular classes” with my black and brown classmates, and, all of a sudden, I get plucked out.
I remember I was sitting right in the middle of a class, and it was just all white students around me, and that that was my first time just sort of knowing “Okay, I’m different.” I’m being portrayed as different, and I don’t know how I feel about this because, even back then, I felt empathetic towards my classmates in the other class because who’s to say that they’re not as smart or not as gifted or whatever. They just haven’t been given the same opportunities, or maybe their parents didn’t think in the same way that my mom did.
So yeah, it definitely led to a disruptive streak because I didn’t really feel like I belonged anywhere. It’s weird when you’re in your neighborhood, you’re playing with your friends, and they’re all black. Then you go to school, and you have white friends. You’re in a class with black people, and all of a sudden, you’re in class with white people.
So, it was easy to just kind of feel disjointed, and I think that’s what led to my disruptive streak that went through middle school as well. My middle school years were really tough.
My GPA was terrible. I didn’t get back on track until high school. That disruptive streak was only about two or three years, but it was a very pronounced disruption.
You praise De La’s versatility, as “the nice guys who finished first.” Did seeing them lauded for their lighthearted antics in a culture that oftentimes celebrated more violent tendencies affect you at such a young age?
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, it did, because it showed me that I didn’t have to be like everybody else. They showed me through their music that, as much as I appreciate and still appreciate groups like NWA, as much as I appreciate the sort of education of Boogie Down Productions, the sort of lyrical complexity of Rakim and people like Nas, De La showed that they could still talk about the thing but not necessarily do it in the way that everybody else was doing it.
And I appreciated that. I appreciated the fact that on songs like “Ghetto Thang” or “My Brother’s a Basehead,” there’s social commentary in the music. I appreciated how theirs is more of a subtle touch, and they weren’t beating you over the head with it. Whereas as much as I dug Boogie Down Productions and KRS-One, I feel like he could be preachy, and he could talk at you a lot. And I’m just like, “Okay, I get it. You’re smart. I understand.” I need somebody who’s gonna kind of reach me on the same level, and that’s what I feel like De La Soul did.
They were telling you all the things, but it was almost like they were wrapping their arms around your shoulders and being like, “Okay, here’s what we went through, so you won’t go through it.” And in that way, that felt like my older brothers, my cousins, grandfathers, uncles, all the older males in my family because they didn’t do it how everybody else was doing it.
I’m not sure I’d necessarily classify you or I as “old heads” just yet, but you touch on something a few times in the book that I also find myself struggling with at times when you say, “Whatever the genre, old heads have problems with music they can’t understand.” I’ve interviewed several artists who believe we need to be open to new styles and sounds in hip-hop, but a lot of what I’m hearing nowadays just ain’t it. Are we just not understanding this new wave in hip-hop?
Marcus J. Moore: You know, I struggle with that. I do struggle with that because I make it a point to listen. I’m gonna sound like the old head. I’m gonna just jump out there ten toes down and say that the hip-hop music right now, by and large, is just low-vibrational. I’m sorry. And that’s not to say that everything that came out in the 90s was great because I feel like that’s also a myth. A lot of people our age, and a little bit older, we’ll always try to act like everything was amazing in the 90s, and there was no bad music anywhere. That’s a total lie. We had a lot of bad music that came out in the 90s. We just don’t want to talk about it.
But to counteract, we also had our legends coming out with their first records then. So, you had Mobb Deep and Nas and Snoop and Wu-Tang. I try to listen to all of the stuff, but I feel like the thing that’s hampering hip-hop right now is that there just isn’t a whole lot of diversity. I think back to when we were both listening to the radio, within a block you could hear the latest Wu-Tang song, but you can also hear The Fugees. Maybe you’ll hear an older Public Enemy track, but then maybe you’ll get something else. You know. You’re getting all kinds of different things within just thirty minutes.
Whereas now, I feel like I can’t tell the difference between anybody because they all sound exactly the same, sans Kendrick, sans Tyler. Doechii is another one. I feel like everybody else just follows the same formula, and I don’t know who to blame. The easy blame for me is the record label because, if they see one thing streaming well or performing well, they want that over and over.
Whatever’s going to make the most impact.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, what’s gonna make the most impact, and they’re not really into what’s gonna be the most artful. You can go either way. I struggle. I don’t necessarily want to be the old guy yelling at the cloud, but I also listen to a lot of music, and it just doesn’t have the same vibe to it.
Indeed. De La were trendsetters and boundary breakers, helping fellow artists and fans feel more comfortable being themselves instead of being chastised for not conforming to what was popular. Why was having the space to behave authentically so important to you during a time in your life when you may have been feeling ostracized by your peers?
Marcus J. Moore: They provided structure in their music. And even though De La is the main character in this conversation, obviously, I also gotta give a lot of credit to Native Tongues overall. And even when I was in high school, The Soulquarians were of that ilk where it was important because they showed that you could have structure. As much as I kind of wanted to wyle out, and I kind of wanted to do other things that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be doing. Just regular teenage stuff whether it’s, I don’t know, smoking weed or chasing girls, whatever. Through the music, because I’ve always been a music head, the music showed me that I couldn’t go but so far. They almost kind of indirectly reminded me like, “No, you still got parents, and you still got elders, and you still got people who are gonna let you know that you messing up either physically or verbally.”
So, for me, it’s always been about the music, as cliche as it sounds. Even now as a 40-something, I notice if I’m having a bad time, or if I’m feeling down, I can play a Stevie Wonder playlist and reset, or I can play somebody like Shabaka, or I can play some spiritual jazz and reset. I say all that to say it all started with De La. It all started with that sort of “alternative hip-hop” road because that was more my aesthetic, and I felt like the vibrations were a little bit higher than playing something else that may sound good in the moment, but that’s not necessarily the lifestyle I want to reflect.
Going back to your dreams of becoming a rapper at the age of thirteen, I need to know more about the Final Chapta, which you mentioned in passing at one point in the narrative. Were the other members fellow De La fanatics?
Marcus J. Moore: No, they were Wu-Tang guys. The Final Chapta was this rap group. It was myself, my friend Troy. (R.I.P Troy.) And Thomas. We were all based in Landover. Me and Troy lived in the same neighborhood. Our friend Thomas lived across the highway, but still Sea Pleasant, Landover. We were heavily influenced by the whole Wu-Tang movement. We formed a group in 1995, and I can’t remember what we were playing. I was playing the Ol’ Dirty dirty record. I was playing that record because it was just kind of weird and bugged out, and that was always my style.
My friend Troy was a huge RZA fan. He was a fanatic. So, he was playing Raekwon. He was playing that first Raekwon, The Purple Tape. But then I remember when we first started rapping, GZA’S Liquid Swords had just come out. And then, we heard that beat on Liquid Swords, and we were like, “What is this this beat? I’ve never heard a loop like this. Like, this is crazy.” So, that influenced us to start rapping honestly. We would practice. It was a whole thing. We had a demo tape that I’m sure Thomas probably still has. We would go to the studio. I came up with the name. You know, chapter book writer. I was like, “Oh, the Final Chapta! We should go with it. But it can’t be chapter. That’s kind of corny. We gotta put an ‘A’ on the end. Oh, that’s tight. That’s tight.”
So yeah, we were serious about it. We would do talent shows and by the time we got to high school, we were part of this larger collective. Again, Wu-Tang, right? So, I remember there was this other friend group that we had. They were rapping, and they were influenced by Wu-Tang. We all were like, “We should all form a big group and just rap.” And we would do that. We would go to record stores on the weekends, and we would write songs together. Yeah, it was a thing.
I know a lot of people probably won’t believe it reading this or listening to this, but I got witnesses that can prove that I actually was really good. I will never rap ever again, but at the time, I was really good. I’m retired. Matter of fact, when I’m in my hometown, I’ll go back around my way, and they’re like, “You should get back into it. You can actually rap.” And I’m like, “Oh, thanks, but I’m good.”
At the time, you “just wanted to rap, play basketball and video games, and read liner notes,” and you fell in love with Jazz “thanks to Tribe’s work.” And now you co-lead the jazz focused 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love” series for The New York Times. What’s it like to be living this dream of writing liner notes (and getting paid to do so) among other dope journalistic opportunities?
Marcus J. Moore: It feels really good because I like writing liner notes more than writing articles because they last longer. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why people go up for articles, but they’re very fleeting where it’s like, “Okay, we’re all talking about this article right now,” and then, in a week or a couple of months or whatever, it’s gone. No one’s talking about it. No one cares about it, and then, you’ve got publicists asking you to do it again. It’s all about chasing a byline and chasing the media hit, chasing the article hit.
Yeah, there are too many articles saying the same thing.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, that’s it, exactly. And it’s all the same. We’re covering the same artist, deriving the same points, things like that. And that’s no diss to any writer because, look, if you’re trying to assess a body of work, like a 30-minute album, there’s only so much you can derive from it. And you’re also not given the time as a writer. If the album comes out this Friday, the review has to be up by Tuesday, so you don’t really have time to sit with this work. I appreciate liner notes because, more often than not, I’m given the music maybe six months to a year before. I sit with it. I can write down notes or whatever, and I’m given more space and time.
And those are things that are discovered years later. With liner notes, it’s in a vinyl package. The record’s gonna come out, and then, maybe ten years later, twenty years later, fifty years later, it’s gonna be in some record bin, and some kid is gonna discover it. And they’re gonna derive something from it. Maybe I’m just projecting, but I know when I discover old records, and I see, “Oh, snap, Amiri Baraka wrote the liner notes on this,” and I read it, and I’m like, “Oh, wow! Okay.” It gives me a new perspective on this music. I think about that anytime I’m writing something, whether it’s an article, whether it’s liner notes, a book. I’m thinking about the youth in my family where, when they come of age, they can look back and see some of the things I was working on at the time or even students that I have. Even if you’re not ready to absorb this message right now, hopefully the writing is strong enough where in twenty or thirty years, you’ll go back to it.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind writing articles, and I love curating 5 Minutes because, if nothing else, I’m putting the homies in The New York Times. Other than that, I would much rather write books because I feel like the work there is more appreciated, as opposed to an article where it’s just people asking you to be in service to them quickly, and that’s not always the way I want to operate.
It’s also a great way, with the liner notes that you were mentioning, for someone you don’t even know X amount of years from now to find them and be all, “Oh, I really enjoyed that. What else can I find from Marcus J. Moore?”
Marcus J. Moore: That’s it. And that’s what’s been happening. So, yeah, I’m thankful for that.
You felt Stakes Is High “was a self-assessing take on creative displacement and a brotherly gaze from a band that knew better.” Throughout the book, and you mentioned earlier in the interview, you describe your relationship with Pos, Dave, and Maseo like they’re family, celebrating their wins and refusing to sugarcoat their shortcomings. When and how did you decide to document their story alongside your own?
Marcus J. Moore: If I’m being honest with you, it was midway through the writing process because when the book first took shape, I thought it was gonna to be a straightforward biography where I was just gonna be talking to a million people in De La’s orbit and deriving something. Similar to the Kendrick book that I wrote where you talk to this person and that person from different communities, and they don’t know each other, and you start getting the same narrative. That’s when a picture starts to form. Whereas with High and Rising, I had this intent to do that, but then, about midway through, I realized that their story is my story as well in the sense that I grew up with the music, and I remember the “Potholes in My Lawn” video. I remember hearing “Me Myself & I,” I remember playing 3 Feet High and Rising, all of those records. I remember all of that very vividly.
So, I emailed my editor and was like, “Look, I feel like this book needs to be more about me. It needs to have my voice in it because I think I’ve reached a point now where people want to know how I feel about something.” And she totally agreed. She was like, “Absolutely. Yeah, you should have been doing this.” So, I just decided midway through to start using “I,” “me,” “I remember.” I’m gonna start doing things like that because I had to get rid of imposter syndrome. I had to get rid of the whole journalistic mindset of, “Okay, my name is small at the top of this article for a reason because nobody cares what I think.” No, my name is gonna be big as hell on the front of this cover, and so, I need to really take ownership over this narrative.
So, that’s what I decided to do. I just decided to write the history as I knew it. And I’m gonna say something. I’m going to preface it by saying, and I’m not comparing myself to this guy at all, but what I told my editor was, “I’m gonna Greg Tate this situation.” When you read Tate, Tate is very authoritative, and he’s like, “This is what it is. This is what I know it to be, and that’s it.” So, I decided to do the same thing and follow his lead on that. It’s my history, too. Write it like you were there because I was outside. I may have been younger, but I was outside as well, and I was absorbing all this music like everybody else.
Grief is not linear but is often deeply personal. The prologue to High and Rising opens with a memory of The DA.I.S.Y Experience at Webster Hall, and the book ends with a poignant note to Dave, raw reminders of the reality that he is no longer with us. How has writing this book helped you find solace in your memories of him, as well as those of your mother and others you have loved and lost?
Marcus J. Moore: Well, I feel like it’s gonna be sort of a multi-part-thing. I think, of the people you mentioned in your question, it helped me resolve my grief around Dave the most because, I mean, obviously it was a book about De La Soul. And when Dave passed, I felt a wave of grief that I wasn’t really expecting because when I think about Dave, I also think about my older cousin Eric who was also of that age and passed a few years before Dave. I remember Dave and my cousin Eric being of that same generation, may have even been the same age, and it felt like my cousin passing away all over again. So, I felt, in a weird way, like writing that letter to Dave was also writing a letter to my cousin Eric because they’re essentially the same cat. So, it helped me realize that we only get one crack at life, and you gotta learn to make the most of it. And I feel like Dave, even though he passed really young, made the most of his time here just like my cousin Eric made the most of his time.
If anything, and also with my mom, it just helped me realize that life is fleeting. You can be here, and then one day, you’re not here. So, while you’re here, you owe it to yourself to pursue your happiness. You owe it to yourself to see your ideas through to the end and do the best that you can because none of us leave out with the right answers. It just kind of helped me to write the letter and deal with that grief and helped me to understand that you gotta lean into life as much as you can.
So, that’s what I’ve been doing, and that’s what I’m gonna be doing in my next book, too, which will get announced soon. It’s about me and my mom’s relationship through music. That’s the first of the two books. It’s about that, and it’s helping me realize that, look, this isn’t to say that I’m about to do anything crazy, but when you see death happen to your most cherished loved one, it really doesn’t make you fearful. You’re living fearlessly. And again, I’m not about to go out here and run into the middle of the street, but at the same time, death is not this thing that I’m afraid of because when you see it happen, it just kind of changes your perspective in a real way. So, writing about it, and then also writing about how I saw it happen, has been life-altering for me in so many different ways.
Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time. Are there any other projects coming in 2025 you want to promote?
Marcus J. Moore: The next book right now is titled Songs For My Mother from The Horace Silver Quintet, “Song For My Father,” but it’s about me writing a letter to my mom, wherever she is now, about our relationship to music. Basically, how she put me onto music, but then, as she got older, how I put her onto music. So, it’s about how she put me onto actual Stevie Wonder B-sides and Elton John, James Brown, Al Green, The Isley Brothers, Madonna. But then one time, she took my Mos Def CD, Black on Both Sides. She also loved The New Danger. Then I put her onto James Blake, and I put her onto Bon Iver. So, it’s this evolution. And then, the second book is an authorized biography of Max Roach.
Oh, wow! I remember reading your 5 Minutes about him.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, so I’m finally gonna write my jazz book because a lot of the jazz homies are like, “Yo, you’re a jazz dude, but you haven’t written a jazz book yet.” I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right but just stick with me. It’s coming soon.” So, that’s the next thing. And then curating a show for Winter Jazzfest that celebrates Strata-East Records. Other than that, I’m just kind of laying low. That’s on purpose.
Oh, yeah, ‘cause you have time to lay low with all that.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, I’m already working on Book #3 in a real way.
So, what their sort of subtlety showed me is that you can still look fly, and you can still be cool but not have on the Diadoras or have on the velour jumpsuit or the Jordaches or whatever. You didn’t have to have on all the Top Flite things to be cool. And I still carry that with me now. I’m not gonna be the dude that has the Top Flite fashion, but I’ll get something that possibly no one’s ever seen, and I’ll throw it together and try to make it work in that way. I would say that’s not so much a direct call back to De La Soul. It’s also more of a call back to, quite honestly, just not really having it like that growing up and not having the money to just get what I wanted.
So, that just sort of stuck with me. I could go get the Jordans now, but maybe I want to get the fly shoes nobody has and nobody’s ever seen. I don’t wanna get something that has the branding across the front of the hat. Let me just get something subtle. I feel like their aesthetic also kind of helped keep money in my pocket in a way because I don’t really have the money to be doing all the stuff that everybody else is doing. And, you know, now as an adult, I find I don’t have to do that, and I’m still okay.
You share about the first time you “felt othered” around the age of ten when you were expected to excel in the ‘talented and gifted’ program at school but were more focused on how music made you feel at a time when you were being introduced to rap music. Would you say your disruptive routine during that time had you leaning into mood music more?
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, probably. I would say so because I guess my disruptive streak was no different from any other kid that’s trying to figure it out. But my situation was a little bit different because growing up as a talented and gifted kid around a time when talented and gifted was a thing in the education system, it was easy to feel othered.
I also came up right when busing was a thing and desegregation in schools. Busing in the 80s was a thing. So, even though I grew up in a neighborhood that had pretty much nothing but black people in it, I’m hopping on a bus and going to another side of town. And all of a sudden, I’m seeing white kids. I knew that at a certain point I was going to be having “regular classes” with my black and brown classmates, and, all of a sudden, I get plucked out.
I remember I was sitting right in the middle of a class, and it was just all white students around me, and that that was my first time just sort of knowing “Okay, I’m different.” I’m being portrayed as different, and I don’t know how I feel about this because, even back then, I felt empathetic towards my classmates in the other class because who’s to say that they’re not as smart or not as gifted or whatever. They just haven’t been given the same opportunities, or maybe their parents didn’t think in the same way that my mom did.
So yeah, it definitely led to a disruptive streak because I didn’t really feel like I belonged anywhere. It’s weird when you’re in your neighborhood, you’re playing with your friends, and they’re all black. Then you go to school, and you have white friends. You’re in a class with black people, and all of a sudden, you’re in class with white people.
So, it was easy to just kind of feel disjointed, and I think that’s what led to my disruptive streak that went through middle school as well. My middle school years were really tough.
My GPA was terrible. I didn’t get back on track until high school. That disruptive streak was only about two or three years, but it was a very pronounced disruption.
You praise De La’s versatility, as “the nice guys who finished first.” Did seeing them lauded for their lighthearted antics in a culture that oftentimes celebrated more violent tendencies affect you at such a young age?
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, it did, because it showed me that I didn’t have to be like everybody else. They showed me through their music that, as much as I appreciate and still appreciate groups like NWA, as much as I appreciate the sort of education of Boogie Down Productions, the sort of lyrical complexity of Rakim and people like Nas, De La showed that they could still talk about the thing but not necessarily do it in the way that everybody else was doing it.
And I appreciated that. I appreciated the fact that on songs like “Ghetto Thang” or “My Brother’s a Basehead,” there’s social commentary in the music. I appreciated how theirs is more of a subtle touch, and they weren’t beating you over the head with it. Whereas as much as I dug Boogie Down Productions and KRS-One, I feel like he could be preachy, and he could talk at you a lot. And I’m just like, “Okay, I get it. You’re smart. I understand.” I need somebody who’s gonna kind of reach me on the same level, and that’s what I feel like De La Soul did.
They were telling you all the things, but it was almost like they were wrapping their arms around your shoulders and being like, “Okay, here’s what we went through, so you won’t go through it.” And in that way, that felt like my older brothers, my cousins, grandfathers, uncles, all the older males in my family because they didn’t do it how everybody else was doing it.
I’m not sure I’d necessarily classify you or I as “old heads” just yet, but you touch on something a few times in the book that I also find myself struggling with at times when you say, “Whatever the genre, old heads have problems with music they can’t understand.” I’ve interviewed several artists who believe we need to be open to new styles and sounds in hip-hop, but a lot of what I’m hearing nowadays just ain’t it. Are we just not understanding this new wave in hip-hop?
Marcus J. Moore: You know, I struggle with that. I do struggle with that because I make it a point to listen. I’m gonna sound like the old head. I’m gonna just jump out there ten toes down and say that the hip-hop music right now, by and large, is just low-vibrational. I’m sorry. And that’s not to say that everything that came out in the 90s was great because I feel like that’s also a myth. A lot of people our age, and a little bit older, we’ll always try to act like everything was amazing in the 90s, and there was no bad music anywhere. That’s a total lie. We had a lot of bad music that came out in the 90s. We just don’t want to talk about it.
But to counteract, we also had our legends coming out with their first records then. So, you had Mobb Deep and Nas and Snoop and Wu-Tang. I try to listen to all of the stuff, but I feel like the thing that’s hampering hip-hop right now is that there just isn’t a whole lot of diversity. I think back to when we were both listening to the radio, within a block you could hear the latest Wu-Tang song, but you can also hear The Fugees. Maybe you’ll hear an older Public Enemy track, but then maybe you’ll get something else. You know. You’re getting all kinds of different things within just thirty minutes.
Whereas now, I feel like I can’t tell the difference between anybody because they all sound exactly the same, sans Kendrick, sans Tyler. Doechii is another one. I feel like everybody else just follows the same formula, and I don’t know who to blame. The easy blame for me is the record label because, if they see one thing streaming well or performing well, they want that over and over.
Whatever’s going to make the most impact.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, what’s gonna make the most impact, and they’re not really into what’s gonna be the most artful. You can go either way. I struggle. I don’t necessarily want to be the old guy yelling at the cloud, but I also listen to a lot of music, and it just doesn’t have the same vibe to it.
Indeed. De La were trendsetters and boundary breakers, helping fellow artists and fans feel more comfortable being themselves instead of being chastised for not conforming to what was popular. Why was having the space to behave authentically so important to you during a time in your life when you may have been feeling ostracized by your peers?
Marcus J. Moore: They provided structure in their music. And even though De La is the main character in this conversation, obviously, I also gotta give a lot of credit to Native Tongues overall. And even when I was in high school, The Soulquarians were of that ilk where it was important because they showed that you could have structure. As much as I kind of wanted to wyle out, and I kind of wanted to do other things that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be doing. Just regular teenage stuff whether it’s, I don’t know, smoking weed or chasing girls, whatever. Through the music, because I’ve always been a music head, the music showed me that I couldn’t go but so far. They almost kind of indirectly reminded me like, “No, you still got parents, and you still got elders, and you still got people who are gonna let you know that you messing up either physically or verbally.”
So, for me, it’s always been about the music, as cliche as it sounds. Even now as a 40-something, I notice if I’m having a bad time, or if I’m feeling down, I can play a Stevie Wonder playlist and reset, or I can play somebody like Shabaka, or I can play some spiritual jazz and reset. I say all that to say it all started with De La. It all started with that sort of “alternative hip-hop” road because that was more my aesthetic, and I felt like the vibrations were a little bit higher than playing something else that may sound good in the moment, but that’s not necessarily the lifestyle I want to reflect.
Going back to your dreams of becoming a rapper at the age of thirteen, I need to know more about the Final Chapta, which you mentioned in passing at one point in the narrative. Were the other members fellow De La fanatics?
Marcus J. Moore: No, they were Wu-Tang guys. The Final Chapta was this rap group. It was myself, my friend Troy. (R.I.P Troy.) And Thomas. We were all based in Landover. Me and Troy lived in the same neighborhood. Our friend Thomas lived across the highway, but still Sea Pleasant, Landover. We were heavily influenced by the whole Wu-Tang movement. We formed a group in 1995, and I can’t remember what we were playing. I was playing the Ol’ Dirty dirty record. I was playing that record because it was just kind of weird and bugged out, and that was always my style.
My friend Troy was a huge RZA fan. He was a fanatic. So, he was playing Raekwon. He was playing that first Raekwon, The Purple Tape. But then I remember when we first started rapping, GZA’S Liquid Swords had just come out. And then, we heard that beat on Liquid Swords, and we were like, “What is this this beat? I’ve never heard a loop like this. Like, this is crazy.” So, that influenced us to start rapping honestly. We would practice. It was a whole thing. We had a demo tape that I’m sure Thomas probably still has. We would go to the studio. I came up with the name. You know, chapter book writer. I was like, “Oh, the Final Chapta! We should go with it. But it can’t be chapter. That’s kind of corny. We gotta put an ‘A’ on the end. Oh, that’s tight. That’s tight.”
So yeah, we were serious about it. We would do talent shows and by the time we got to high school, we were part of this larger collective. Again, Wu-Tang, right? So, I remember there was this other friend group that we had. They were rapping, and they were influenced by Wu-Tang. We all were like, “We should all form a big group and just rap.” And we would do that. We would go to record stores on the weekends, and we would write songs together. Yeah, it was a thing.
I know a lot of people probably won’t believe it reading this or listening to this, but I got witnesses that can prove that I actually was really good. I will never rap ever again, but at the time, I was really good. I’m retired. Matter of fact, when I’m in my hometown, I’ll go back around my way, and they’re like, “You should get back into it. You can actually rap.” And I’m like, “Oh, thanks, but I’m good.”
At the time, you “just wanted to rap, play basketball and video games, and read liner notes,” and you fell in love with Jazz “thanks to Tribe’s work.” And now you co-lead the jazz focused 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love” series for The New York Times. What’s it like to be living this dream of writing liner notes (and getting paid to do so) among other dope journalistic opportunities?
Marcus J. Moore: It feels really good because I like writing liner notes more than writing articles because they last longer. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why people go up for articles, but they’re very fleeting where it’s like, “Okay, we’re all talking about this article right now,” and then, in a week or a couple of months or whatever, it’s gone. No one’s talking about it. No one cares about it, and then, you’ve got publicists asking you to do it again. It’s all about chasing a byline and chasing the media hit, chasing the article hit.
Yeah, there are too many articles saying the same thing.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, that’s it, exactly. And it’s all the same. We’re covering the same artist, deriving the same points, things like that. And that’s no diss to any writer because, look, if you’re trying to assess a body of work, like a 30-minute album, there’s only so much you can derive from it. And you’re also not given the time as a writer. If the album comes out this Friday, the review has to be up by Tuesday, so you don’t really have time to sit with this work. I appreciate liner notes because, more often than not, I’m given the music maybe six months to a year before. I sit with it. I can write down notes or whatever, and I’m given more space and time.
And those are things that are discovered years later. With liner notes, it’s in a vinyl package. The record’s gonna come out, and then, maybe ten years later, twenty years later, fifty years later, it’s gonna be in some record bin, and some kid is gonna discover it. And they’re gonna derive something from it. Maybe I’m just projecting, but I know when I discover old records, and I see, “Oh, snap, Amiri Baraka wrote the liner notes on this,” and I read it, and I’m like, “Oh, wow! Okay.” It gives me a new perspective on this music. I think about that anytime I’m writing something, whether it’s an article, whether it’s liner notes, a book. I’m thinking about the youth in my family where, when they come of age, they can look back and see some of the things I was working on at the time or even students that I have. Even if you’re not ready to absorb this message right now, hopefully the writing is strong enough where in twenty or thirty years, you’ll go back to it.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind writing articles, and I love curating 5 Minutes because, if nothing else, I’m putting the homies in The New York Times. Other than that, I would much rather write books because I feel like the work there is more appreciated, as opposed to an article where it’s just people asking you to be in service to them quickly, and that’s not always the way I want to operate.
It’s also a great way, with the liner notes that you were mentioning, for someone you don’t even know X amount of years from now to find them and be all, “Oh, I really enjoyed that. What else can I find from Marcus J. Moore?”
Marcus J. Moore: That’s it. And that’s what’s been happening. So, yeah, I’m thankful for that.
You felt Stakes Is High “was a self-assessing take on creative displacement and a brotherly gaze from a band that knew better.” Throughout the book, and you mentioned earlier in the interview, you describe your relationship with Pos, Dave, and Maseo like they’re family, celebrating their wins and refusing to sugarcoat their shortcomings. When and how did you decide to document their story alongside your own?
Marcus J. Moore: If I’m being honest with you, it was midway through the writing process because when the book first took shape, I thought it was gonna to be a straightforward biography where I was just gonna be talking to a million people in De La’s orbit and deriving something. Similar to the Kendrick book that I wrote where you talk to this person and that person from different communities, and they don’t know each other, and you start getting the same narrative. That’s when a picture starts to form. Whereas with High and Rising, I had this intent to do that, but then, about midway through, I realized that their story is my story as well in the sense that I grew up with the music, and I remember the “Potholes in My Lawn” video. I remember hearing “Me Myself & I,” I remember playing 3 Feet High and Rising, all of those records. I remember all of that very vividly.
So, I emailed my editor and was like, “Look, I feel like this book needs to be more about me. It needs to have my voice in it because I think I’ve reached a point now where people want to know how I feel about something.” And she totally agreed. She was like, “Absolutely. Yeah, you should have been doing this.” So, I just decided midway through to start using “I,” “me,” “I remember.” I’m gonna start doing things like that because I had to get rid of imposter syndrome. I had to get rid of the whole journalistic mindset of, “Okay, my name is small at the top of this article for a reason because nobody cares what I think.” No, my name is gonna be big as hell on the front of this cover, and so, I need to really take ownership over this narrative.
So, that’s what I decided to do. I just decided to write the history as I knew it. And I’m gonna say something. I’m going to preface it by saying, and I’m not comparing myself to this guy at all, but what I told my editor was, “I’m gonna Greg Tate this situation.” When you read Tate, Tate is very authoritative, and he’s like, “This is what it is. This is what I know it to be, and that’s it.” So, I decided to do the same thing and follow his lead on that. It’s my history, too. Write it like you were there because I was outside. I may have been younger, but I was outside as well, and I was absorbing all this music like everybody else.
Grief is not linear but is often deeply personal. The prologue to High and Rising opens with a memory of The DA.I.S.Y Experience at Webster Hall, and the book ends with a poignant note to Dave, raw reminders of the reality that he is no longer with us. How has writing this book helped you find solace in your memories of him, as well as those of your mother and others you have loved and lost?
Marcus J. Moore: Well, I feel like it’s gonna be sort of a multi-part-thing. I think, of the people you mentioned in your question, it helped me resolve my grief around Dave the most because, I mean, obviously it was a book about De La Soul. And when Dave passed, I felt a wave of grief that I wasn’t really expecting because when I think about Dave, I also think about my older cousin Eric who was also of that age and passed a few years before Dave. I remember Dave and my cousin Eric being of that same generation, may have even been the same age, and it felt like my cousin passing away all over again. So, I felt, in a weird way, like writing that letter to Dave was also writing a letter to my cousin Eric because they’re essentially the same cat. So, it helped me realize that we only get one crack at life, and you gotta learn to make the most of it. And I feel like Dave, even though he passed really young, made the most of his time here just like my cousin Eric made the most of his time.
If anything, and also with my mom, it just helped me realize that life is fleeting. You can be here, and then one day, you’re not here. So, while you’re here, you owe it to yourself to pursue your happiness. You owe it to yourself to see your ideas through to the end and do the best that you can because none of us leave out with the right answers. It just kind of helped me to write the letter and deal with that grief and helped me to understand that you gotta lean into life as much as you can.
So, that’s what I’ve been doing, and that’s what I’m gonna be doing in my next book, too, which will get announced soon. It’s about me and my mom’s relationship through music. That’s the first of the two books. It’s about that, and it’s helping me realize that, look, this isn’t to say that I’m about to do anything crazy, but when you see death happen to your most cherished loved one, it really doesn’t make you fearful. You’re living fearlessly. And again, I’m not about to go out here and run into the middle of the street, but at the same time, death is not this thing that I’m afraid of because when you see it happen, it just kind of changes your perspective in a real way. So, writing about it, and then also writing about how I saw it happen, has been life-altering for me in so many different ways.
Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time. Are there any other projects coming in 2025 you want to promote?
Marcus J. Moore: The next book right now is titled Songs For My Mother from The Horace Silver Quintet, “Song For My Father,” but it’s about me writing a letter to my mom, wherever she is now, about our relationship to music. Basically, how she put me onto music, but then, as she got older, how I put her onto music. So, it’s about how she put me onto actual Stevie Wonder B-sides and Elton John, James Brown, Al Green, The Isley Brothers, Madonna. But then one time, she took my Mos Def CD, Black on Both Sides. She also loved The New Danger. Then I put her onto James Blake, and I put her onto Bon Iver. So, it’s this evolution. And then, the second book is an authorized biography of Max Roach.
Oh, wow! I remember reading your 5 Minutes about him.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, so I’m finally gonna write my jazz book because a lot of the jazz homies are like, “Yo, you’re a jazz dude, but you haven’t written a jazz book yet.” I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right but just stick with me. It’s coming soon.” So, that’s the next thing. And then curating a show for Winter Jazzfest that celebrates Strata-East Records. Other than that, I’m just kind of laying low. That’s on purpose.
Oh, yeah, ‘cause you have time to lay low with all that.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, I’m already working on Book #3 in a real way.
And I appreciated that. I appreciated the fact that on songs like “Ghetto Thang” or “My Brother’s a Basehead,” there’s social commentary in the music. I appreciated how theirs is more of a subtle touch, and they weren’t beating you over the head with it. Whereas as much as I dug Boogie Down Productions and KRS-One, I feel like he could be preachy, and he could talk at you a lot. And I’m just like, “Okay, I get it. You’re smart. I understand.” I need somebody who’s gonna kind of reach me on the same level, and that’s what I feel like De La Soul did.
They were telling you all the things, but it was almost like they were wrapping their arms around your shoulders and being like, “Okay, here’s what we went through, so you won’t go through it.” And in that way, that felt like my older brothers, my cousins, grandfathers, uncles, all the older males in my family because they didn’t do it how everybody else was doing it.
I’m not sure I’d necessarily classify you or I as “old heads” just yet, but you touch on something a few times in the book that I also find myself struggling with at times when you say, “Whatever the genre, old heads have problems with music they can’t understand.” I’ve interviewed several artists who believe we need to be open to new styles and sounds in hip-hop, but a lot of what I’m hearing nowadays just ain’t it. Are we just not understanding this new wave in hip-hop?
Marcus J. Moore: You know, I struggle with that. I do struggle with that because I make it a point to listen. I’m gonna sound like the old head. I’m gonna just jump out there ten toes down and say that the hip-hop music right now, by and large, is just low-vibrational. I’m sorry. And that’s not to say that everything that came out in the 90s was great because I feel like that’s also a myth. A lot of people our age, and a little bit older, we’ll always try to act like everything was amazing in the 90s, and there was no bad music anywhere. That’s a total lie. We had a lot of bad music that came out in the 90s. We just don’t want to talk about it.
But to counteract, we also had our legends coming out with their first records then. So, you had Mobb Deep and Nas and Snoop and Wu-Tang. I try to listen to all of the stuff, but I feel like the thing that’s hampering hip-hop right now is that there just isn’t a whole lot of diversity. I think back to when we were both listening to the radio, within a block you could hear the latest Wu-Tang song, but you can also hear The Fugees. Maybe you’ll hear an older Public Enemy track, but then maybe you’ll get something else. You know. You’re getting all kinds of different things within just thirty minutes.
Whereas now, I feel like I can’t tell the difference between anybody because they all sound exactly the same, sans Kendrick, sans Tyler. Doechii is another one. I feel like everybody else just follows the same formula, and I don’t know who to blame. The easy blame for me is the record label because, if they see one thing streaming well or performing well, they want that over and over.
Whatever’s going to make the most impact.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, what’s gonna make the most impact, and they’re not really into what’s gonna be the most artful. You can go either way. I struggle. I don’t necessarily want to be the old guy yelling at the cloud, but I also listen to a lot of music, and it just doesn’t have the same vibe to it.
Indeed. De La were trendsetters and boundary breakers, helping fellow artists and fans feel more comfortable being themselves instead of being chastised for not conforming to what was popular. Why was having the space to behave authentically so important to you during a time in your life when you may have been feeling ostracized by your peers?
Marcus J. Moore: They provided structure in their music. And even though De La is the main character in this conversation, obviously, I also gotta give a lot of credit to Native Tongues overall. And even when I was in high school, The Soulquarians were of that ilk where it was important because they showed that you could have structure. As much as I kind of wanted to wyle out, and I kind of wanted to do other things that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be doing. Just regular teenage stuff whether it’s, I don’t know, smoking weed or chasing girls, whatever. Through the music, because I’ve always been a music head, the music showed me that I couldn’t go but so far. They almost kind of indirectly reminded me like, “No, you still got parents, and you still got elders, and you still got people who are gonna let you know that you messing up either physically or verbally.”
So, for me, it’s always been about the music, as cliche as it sounds. Even now as a 40-something, I notice if I’m having a bad time, or if I’m feeling down, I can play a Stevie Wonder playlist and reset, or I can play somebody like Shabaka, or I can play some spiritual jazz and reset. I say all that to say it all started with De La. It all started with that sort of “alternative hip-hop” road because that was more my aesthetic, and I felt like the vibrations were a little bit higher than playing something else that may sound good in the moment, but that’s not necessarily the lifestyle I want to reflect.
Going back to your dreams of becoming a rapper at the age of thirteen, I need to know more about the Final Chapta, which you mentioned in passing at one point in the narrative. Were the other members fellow De La fanatics?
Marcus J. Moore: No, they were Wu-Tang guys. The Final Chapta was this rap group. It was myself, my friend Troy. (R.I.P Troy.) And Thomas. We were all based in Landover. Me and Troy lived in the same neighborhood. Our friend Thomas lived across the highway, but still Sea Pleasant, Landover. We were heavily influenced by the whole Wu-Tang movement. We formed a group in 1995, and I can’t remember what we were playing. I was playing the Ol’ Dirty dirty record. I was playing that record because it was just kind of weird and bugged out, and that was always my style.
My friend Troy was a huge RZA fan. He was a fanatic. So, he was playing Raekwon. He was playing that first Raekwon, The Purple Tape. But then I remember when we first started rapping, GZA’S Liquid Swords had just come out. And then, we heard that beat on Liquid Swords, and we were like, “What is this this beat? I’ve never heard a loop like this. Like, this is crazy.” So, that influenced us to start rapping honestly. We would practice. It was a whole thing. We had a demo tape that I’m sure Thomas probably still has. We would go to the studio. I came up with the name. You know, chapter book writer. I was like, “Oh, the Final Chapta! We should go with it. But it can’t be chapter. That’s kind of corny. We gotta put an ‘A’ on the end. Oh, that’s tight. That’s tight.”
So yeah, we were serious about it. We would do talent shows and by the time we got to high school, we were part of this larger collective. Again, Wu-Tang, right? So, I remember there was this other friend group that we had. They were rapping, and they were influenced by Wu-Tang. We all were like, “We should all form a big group and just rap.” And we would do that. We would go to record stores on the weekends, and we would write songs together. Yeah, it was a thing.
I know a lot of people probably won’t believe it reading this or listening to this, but I got witnesses that can prove that I actually was really good. I will never rap ever again, but at the time, I was really good. I’m retired. Matter of fact, when I’m in my hometown, I’ll go back around my way, and they’re like, “You should get back into it. You can actually rap.” And I’m like, “Oh, thanks, but I’m good.”
At the time, you “just wanted to rap, play basketball and video games, and read liner notes,” and you fell in love with Jazz “thanks to Tribe’s work.” And now you co-lead the jazz focused 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love” series for The New York Times. What’s it like to be living this dream of writing liner notes (and getting paid to do so) among other dope journalistic opportunities?
Marcus J. Moore: It feels really good because I like writing liner notes more than writing articles because they last longer. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why people go up for articles, but they’re very fleeting where it’s like, “Okay, we’re all talking about this article right now,” and then, in a week or a couple of months or whatever, it’s gone. No one’s talking about it. No one cares about it, and then, you’ve got publicists asking you to do it again. It’s all about chasing a byline and chasing the media hit, chasing the article hit.
Yeah, there are too many articles saying the same thing.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, that’s it, exactly. And it’s all the same. We’re covering the same artist, deriving the same points, things like that. And that’s no diss to any writer because, look, if you’re trying to assess a body of work, like a 30-minute album, there’s only so much you can derive from it. And you’re also not given the time as a writer. If the album comes out this Friday, the review has to be up by Tuesday, so you don’t really have time to sit with this work. I appreciate liner notes because, more often than not, I’m given the music maybe six months to a year before. I sit with it. I can write down notes or whatever, and I’m given more space and time.
And those are things that are discovered years later. With liner notes, it’s in a vinyl package. The record’s gonna come out, and then, maybe ten years later, twenty years later, fifty years later, it’s gonna be in some record bin, and some kid is gonna discover it. And they’re gonna derive something from it. Maybe I’m just projecting, but I know when I discover old records, and I see, “Oh, snap, Amiri Baraka wrote the liner notes on this,” and I read it, and I’m like, “Oh, wow! Okay.” It gives me a new perspective on this music. I think about that anytime I’m writing something, whether it’s an article, whether it’s liner notes, a book. I’m thinking about the youth in my family where, when they come of age, they can look back and see some of the things I was working on at the time or even students that I have. Even if you’re not ready to absorb this message right now, hopefully the writing is strong enough where in twenty or thirty years, you’ll go back to it.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind writing articles, and I love curating 5 Minutes because, if nothing else, I’m putting the homies in The New York Times. Other than that, I would much rather write books because I feel like the work there is more appreciated, as opposed to an article where it’s just people asking you to be in service to them quickly, and that’s not always the way I want to operate.
It’s also a great way, with the liner notes that you were mentioning, for someone you don’t even know X amount of years from now to find them and be all, “Oh, I really enjoyed that. What else can I find from Marcus J. Moore?”
Marcus J. Moore: That’s it. And that’s what’s been happening. So, yeah, I’m thankful for that.
You felt Stakes Is High “was a self-assessing take on creative displacement and a brotherly gaze from a band that knew better.” Throughout the book, and you mentioned earlier in the interview, you describe your relationship with Pos, Dave, and Maseo like they’re family, celebrating their wins and refusing to sugarcoat their shortcomings. When and how did you decide to document their story alongside your own?
Marcus J. Moore: If I’m being honest with you, it was midway through the writing process because when the book first took shape, I thought it was gonna to be a straightforward biography where I was just gonna be talking to a million people in De La’s orbit and deriving something. Similar to the Kendrick book that I wrote where you talk to this person and that person from different communities, and they don’t know each other, and you start getting the same narrative. That’s when a picture starts to form. Whereas with High and Rising, I had this intent to do that, but then, about midway through, I realized that their story is my story as well in the sense that I grew up with the music, and I remember the “Potholes in My Lawn” video. I remember hearing “Me Myself & I,” I remember playing 3 Feet High and Rising, all of those records. I remember all of that very vividly.
So, I emailed my editor and was like, “Look, I feel like this book needs to be more about me. It needs to have my voice in it because I think I’ve reached a point now where people want to know how I feel about something.” And she totally agreed. She was like, “Absolutely. Yeah, you should have been doing this.” So, I just decided midway through to start using “I,” “me,” “I remember.” I’m gonna start doing things like that because I had to get rid of imposter syndrome. I had to get rid of the whole journalistic mindset of, “Okay, my name is small at the top of this article for a reason because nobody cares what I think.” No, my name is gonna be big as hell on the front of this cover, and so, I need to really take ownership over this narrative.
So, that’s what I decided to do. I just decided to write the history as I knew it. And I’m gonna say something. I’m going to preface it by saying, and I’m not comparing myself to this guy at all, but what I told my editor was, “I’m gonna Greg Tate this situation.” When you read Tate, Tate is very authoritative, and he’s like, “This is what it is. This is what I know it to be, and that’s it.” So, I decided to do the same thing and follow his lead on that. It’s my history, too. Write it like you were there because I was outside. I may have been younger, but I was outside as well, and I was absorbing all this music like everybody else.
Grief is not linear but is often deeply personal. The prologue to High and Rising opens with a memory of The DA.I.S.Y Experience at Webster Hall, and the book ends with a poignant note to Dave, raw reminders of the reality that he is no longer with us. How has writing this book helped you find solace in your memories of him, as well as those of your mother and others you have loved and lost?
Marcus J. Moore: Well, I feel like it’s gonna be sort of a multi-part-thing. I think, of the people you mentioned in your question, it helped me resolve my grief around Dave the most because, I mean, obviously it was a book about De La Soul. And when Dave passed, I felt a wave of grief that I wasn’t really expecting because when I think about Dave, I also think about my older cousin Eric who was also of that age and passed a few years before Dave. I remember Dave and my cousin Eric being of that same generation, may have even been the same age, and it felt like my cousin passing away all over again. So, I felt, in a weird way, like writing that letter to Dave was also writing a letter to my cousin Eric because they’re essentially the same cat. So, it helped me realize that we only get one crack at life, and you gotta learn to make the most of it. And I feel like Dave, even though he passed really young, made the most of his time here just like my cousin Eric made the most of his time.
If anything, and also with my mom, it just helped me realize that life is fleeting. You can be here, and then one day, you’re not here. So, while you’re here, you owe it to yourself to pursue your happiness. You owe it to yourself to see your ideas through to the end and do the best that you can because none of us leave out with the right answers. It just kind of helped me to write the letter and deal with that grief and helped me to understand that you gotta lean into life as much as you can.
So, that’s what I’ve been doing, and that’s what I’m gonna be doing in my next book, too, which will get announced soon. It’s about me and my mom’s relationship through music. That’s the first of the two books. It’s about that, and it’s helping me realize that, look, this isn’t to say that I’m about to do anything crazy, but when you see death happen to your most cherished loved one, it really doesn’t make you fearful. You’re living fearlessly. And again, I’m not about to go out here and run into the middle of the street, but at the same time, death is not this thing that I’m afraid of because when you see it happen, it just kind of changes your perspective in a real way. So, writing about it, and then also writing about how I saw it happen, has been life-altering for me in so many different ways.
Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time. Are there any other projects coming in 2025 you want to promote?
Marcus J. Moore: The next book right now is titled Songs For My Mother from The Horace Silver Quintet, “Song For My Father,” but it’s about me writing a letter to my mom, wherever she is now, about our relationship to music. Basically, how she put me onto music, but then, as she got older, how I put her onto music. So, it’s about how she put me onto actual Stevie Wonder B-sides and Elton John, James Brown, Al Green, The Isley Brothers, Madonna. But then one time, she took my Mos Def CD, Black on Both Sides. She also loved The New Danger. Then I put her onto James Blake, and I put her onto Bon Iver. So, it’s this evolution. And then, the second book is an authorized biography of Max Roach.
Oh, wow! I remember reading your 5 Minutes about him.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, so I’m finally gonna write my jazz book because a lot of the jazz homies are like, “Yo, you’re a jazz dude, but you haven’t written a jazz book yet.” I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right but just stick with me. It’s coming soon.” So, that’s the next thing. And then curating a show for Winter Jazzfest that celebrates Strata-East Records. Other than that, I’m just kind of laying low. That’s on purpose.
Oh, yeah, ‘cause you have time to lay low with all that.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, I’m already working on Book #3 in a real way.
So, for me, it’s always been about the music, as cliche as it sounds. Even now as a 40-something, I notice if I’m having a bad time, or if I’m feeling down, I can play a Stevie Wonder playlist and reset, or I can play somebody like Shabaka, or I can play some spiritual jazz and reset. I say all that to say it all started with De La. It all started with that sort of “alternative hip-hop” road because that was more my aesthetic, and I felt like the vibrations were a little bit higher than playing something else that may sound good in the moment, but that’s not necessarily the lifestyle I want to reflect.
Going back to your dreams of becoming a rapper at the age of thirteen, I need to know more about the Final Chapta, which you mentioned in passing at one point in the narrative. Were the other members fellow De La fanatics?
Marcus J. Moore: No, they were Wu-Tang guys. The Final Chapta was this rap group. It was myself, my friend Troy. (R.I.P Troy.) And Thomas. We were all based in Landover. Me and Troy lived in the same neighborhood. Our friend Thomas lived across the highway, but still Sea Pleasant, Landover. We were heavily influenced by the whole Wu-Tang movement. We formed a group in 1995, and I can’t remember what we were playing. I was playing the Ol’ Dirty dirty record. I was playing that record because it was just kind of weird and bugged out, and that was always my style.
My friend Troy was a huge RZA fan. He was a fanatic. So, he was playing Raekwon. He was playing that first Raekwon, The Purple Tape. But then I remember when we first started rapping, GZA’S Liquid Swords had just come out. And then, we heard that beat on Liquid Swords, and we were like, “What is this this beat? I’ve never heard a loop like this. Like, this is crazy.” So, that influenced us to start rapping honestly. We would practice. It was a whole thing. We had a demo tape that I’m sure Thomas probably still has. We would go to the studio. I came up with the name. You know, chapter book writer. I was like, “Oh, the Final Chapta! We should go with it. But it can’t be chapter. That’s kind of corny. We gotta put an ‘A’ on the end. Oh, that’s tight. That’s tight.”
So yeah, we were serious about it. We would do talent shows and by the time we got to high school, we were part of this larger collective. Again, Wu-Tang, right? So, I remember there was this other friend group that we had. They were rapping, and they were influenced by Wu-Tang. We all were like, “We should all form a big group and just rap.” And we would do that. We would go to record stores on the weekends, and we would write songs together. Yeah, it was a thing.
I know a lot of people probably won’t believe it reading this or listening to this, but I got witnesses that can prove that I actually was really good. I will never rap ever again, but at the time, I was really good. I’m retired. Matter of fact, when I’m in my hometown, I’ll go back around my way, and they’re like, “You should get back into it. You can actually rap.” And I’m like, “Oh, thanks, but I’m good.”
At the time, you “just wanted to rap, play basketball and video games, and read liner notes,” and you fell in love with Jazz “thanks to Tribe’s work.” And now you co-lead the jazz focused 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love” series for The New York Times. What’s it like to be living this dream of writing liner notes (and getting paid to do so) among other dope journalistic opportunities?
Marcus J. Moore: It feels really good because I like writing liner notes more than writing articles because they last longer. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why people go up for articles, but they’re very fleeting where it’s like, “Okay, we’re all talking about this article right now,” and then, in a week or a couple of months or whatever, it’s gone. No one’s talking about it. No one cares about it, and then, you’ve got publicists asking you to do it again. It’s all about chasing a byline and chasing the media hit, chasing the article hit.
Yeah, there are too many articles saying the same thing.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, that’s it, exactly. And it’s all the same. We’re covering the same artist, deriving the same points, things like that. And that’s no diss to any writer because, look, if you’re trying to assess a body of work, like a 30-minute album, there’s only so much you can derive from it. And you’re also not given the time as a writer. If the album comes out this Friday, the review has to be up by Tuesday, so you don’t really have time to sit with this work. I appreciate liner notes because, more often than not, I’m given the music maybe six months to a year before. I sit with it. I can write down notes or whatever, and I’m given more space and time.
And those are things that are discovered years later. With liner notes, it’s in a vinyl package. The record’s gonna come out, and then, maybe ten years later, twenty years later, fifty years later, it’s gonna be in some record bin, and some kid is gonna discover it. And they’re gonna derive something from it. Maybe I’m just projecting, but I know when I discover old records, and I see, “Oh, snap, Amiri Baraka wrote the liner notes on this,” and I read it, and I’m like, “Oh, wow! Okay.” It gives me a new perspective on this music. I think about that anytime I’m writing something, whether it’s an article, whether it’s liner notes, a book. I’m thinking about the youth in my family where, when they come of age, they can look back and see some of the things I was working on at the time or even students that I have. Even if you’re not ready to absorb this message right now, hopefully the writing is strong enough where in twenty or thirty years, you’ll go back to it.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind writing articles, and I love curating 5 Minutes because, if nothing else, I’m putting the homies in The New York Times. Other than that, I would much rather write books because I feel like the work there is more appreciated, as opposed to an article where it’s just people asking you to be in service to them quickly, and that’s not always the way I want to operate.
It’s also a great way, with the liner notes that you were mentioning, for someone you don’t even know X amount of years from now to find them and be all, “Oh, I really enjoyed that. What else can I find from Marcus J. Moore?”
Marcus J. Moore: That’s it. And that’s what’s been happening. So, yeah, I’m thankful for that.
You felt Stakes Is High “was a self-assessing take on creative displacement and a brotherly gaze from a band that knew better.” Throughout the book, and you mentioned earlier in the interview, you describe your relationship with Pos, Dave, and Maseo like they’re family, celebrating their wins and refusing to sugarcoat their shortcomings. When and how did you decide to document their story alongside your own?
Marcus J. Moore: If I’m being honest with you, it was midway through the writing process because when the book first took shape, I thought it was gonna to be a straightforward biography where I was just gonna be talking to a million people in De La’s orbit and deriving something. Similar to the Kendrick book that I wrote where you talk to this person and that person from different communities, and they don’t know each other, and you start getting the same narrative. That’s when a picture starts to form. Whereas with High and Rising, I had this intent to do that, but then, about midway through, I realized that their story is my story as well in the sense that I grew up with the music, and I remember the “Potholes in My Lawn” video. I remember hearing “Me Myself & I,” I remember playing 3 Feet High and Rising, all of those records. I remember all of that very vividly.
So, I emailed my editor and was like, “Look, I feel like this book needs to be more about me. It needs to have my voice in it because I think I’ve reached a point now where people want to know how I feel about something.” And she totally agreed. She was like, “Absolutely. Yeah, you should have been doing this.” So, I just decided midway through to start using “I,” “me,” “I remember.” I’m gonna start doing things like that because I had to get rid of imposter syndrome. I had to get rid of the whole journalistic mindset of, “Okay, my name is small at the top of this article for a reason because nobody cares what I think.” No, my name is gonna be big as hell on the front of this cover, and so, I need to really take ownership over this narrative.
So, that’s what I decided to do. I just decided to write the history as I knew it. And I’m gonna say something. I’m going to preface it by saying, and I’m not comparing myself to this guy at all, but what I told my editor was, “I’m gonna Greg Tate this situation.” When you read Tate, Tate is very authoritative, and he’s like, “This is what it is. This is what I know it to be, and that’s it.” So, I decided to do the same thing and follow his lead on that. It’s my history, too. Write it like you were there because I was outside. I may have been younger, but I was outside as well, and I was absorbing all this music like everybody else.
Grief is not linear but is often deeply personal. The prologue to High and Rising opens with a memory of The DA.I.S.Y Experience at Webster Hall, and the book ends with a poignant note to Dave, raw reminders of the reality that he is no longer with us. How has writing this book helped you find solace in your memories of him, as well as those of your mother and others you have loved and lost?
Marcus J. Moore: Well, I feel like it’s gonna be sort of a multi-part-thing. I think, of the people you mentioned in your question, it helped me resolve my grief around Dave the most because, I mean, obviously it was a book about De La Soul. And when Dave passed, I felt a wave of grief that I wasn’t really expecting because when I think about Dave, I also think about my older cousin Eric who was also of that age and passed a few years before Dave. I remember Dave and my cousin Eric being of that same generation, may have even been the same age, and it felt like my cousin passing away all over again. So, I felt, in a weird way, like writing that letter to Dave was also writing a letter to my cousin Eric because they’re essentially the same cat. So, it helped me realize that we only get one crack at life, and you gotta learn to make the most of it. And I feel like Dave, even though he passed really young, made the most of his time here just like my cousin Eric made the most of his time.
If anything, and also with my mom, it just helped me realize that life is fleeting. You can be here, and then one day, you’re not here. So, while you’re here, you owe it to yourself to pursue your happiness. You owe it to yourself to see your ideas through to the end and do the best that you can because none of us leave out with the right answers. It just kind of helped me to write the letter and deal with that grief and helped me to understand that you gotta lean into life as much as you can.
So, that’s what I’ve been doing, and that’s what I’m gonna be doing in my next book, too, which will get announced soon. It’s about me and my mom’s relationship through music. That’s the first of the two books. It’s about that, and it’s helping me realize that, look, this isn’t to say that I’m about to do anything crazy, but when you see death happen to your most cherished loved one, it really doesn’t make you fearful. You’re living fearlessly. And again, I’m not about to go out here and run into the middle of the street, but at the same time, death is not this thing that I’m afraid of because when you see it happen, it just kind of changes your perspective in a real way. So, writing about it, and then also writing about how I saw it happen, has been life-altering for me in so many different ways.
Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time. Are there any other projects coming in 2025 you want to promote?
Marcus J. Moore: The next book right now is titled Songs For My Mother from The Horace Silver Quintet, “Song For My Father,” but it’s about me writing a letter to my mom, wherever she is now, about our relationship to music. Basically, how she put me onto music, but then, as she got older, how I put her onto music. So, it’s about how she put me onto actual Stevie Wonder B-sides and Elton John, James Brown, Al Green, The Isley Brothers, Madonna. But then one time, she took my Mos Def CD, Black on Both Sides. She also loved The New Danger. Then I put her onto James Blake, and I put her onto Bon Iver. So, it’s this evolution. And then, the second book is an authorized biography of Max Roach.
Oh, wow! I remember reading your 5 Minutes about him.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, so I’m finally gonna write my jazz book because a lot of the jazz homies are like, “Yo, you’re a jazz dude, but you haven’t written a jazz book yet.” I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right but just stick with me. It’s coming soon.” So, that’s the next thing. And then curating a show for Winter Jazzfest that celebrates Strata-East Records. Other than that, I’m just kind of laying low. That’s on purpose.
Oh, yeah, ‘cause you have time to lay low with all that.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, I’m already working on Book #3 in a real way.
And those are things that are discovered years later. With liner notes, it’s in a vinyl package. The record’s gonna come out, and then, maybe ten years later, twenty years later, fifty years later, it’s gonna be in some record bin, and some kid is gonna discover it. And they’re gonna derive something from it. Maybe I’m just projecting, but I know when I discover old records, and I see, “Oh, snap, Amiri Baraka wrote the liner notes on this,” and I read it, and I’m like, “Oh, wow! Okay.” It gives me a new perspective on this music. I think about that anytime I’m writing something, whether it’s an article, whether it’s liner notes, a book. I’m thinking about the youth in my family where, when they come of age, they can look back and see some of the things I was working on at the time or even students that I have. Even if you’re not ready to absorb this message right now, hopefully the writing is strong enough where in twenty or thirty years, you’ll go back to it.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind writing articles, and I love curating 5 Minutes because, if nothing else, I’m putting the homies in The New York Times. Other than that, I would much rather write books because I feel like the work there is more appreciated, as opposed to an article where it’s just people asking you to be in service to them quickly, and that’s not always the way I want to operate.
It’s also a great way, with the liner notes that you were mentioning, for someone you don’t even know X amount of years from now to find them and be all, “Oh, I really enjoyed that. What else can I find from Marcus J. Moore?”
Marcus J. Moore: That’s it. And that’s what’s been happening. So, yeah, I’m thankful for that.
You felt Stakes Is High “was a self-assessing take on creative displacement and a brotherly gaze from a band that knew better.” Throughout the book, and you mentioned earlier in the interview, you describe your relationship with Pos, Dave, and Maseo like they’re family, celebrating their wins and refusing to sugarcoat their shortcomings. When and how did you decide to document their story alongside your own?
Marcus J. Moore: If I’m being honest with you, it was midway through the writing process because when the book first took shape, I thought it was gonna to be a straightforward biography where I was just gonna be talking to a million people in De La’s orbit and deriving something. Similar to the Kendrick book that I wrote where you talk to this person and that person from different communities, and they don’t know each other, and you start getting the same narrative. That’s when a picture starts to form. Whereas with High and Rising, I had this intent to do that, but then, about midway through, I realized that their story is my story as well in the sense that I grew up with the music, and I remember the “Potholes in My Lawn” video. I remember hearing “Me Myself & I,” I remember playing 3 Feet High and Rising, all of those records. I remember all of that very vividly.
So, I emailed my editor and was like, “Look, I feel like this book needs to be more about me. It needs to have my voice in it because I think I’ve reached a point now where people want to know how I feel about something.” And she totally agreed. She was like, “Absolutely. Yeah, you should have been doing this.” So, I just decided midway through to start using “I,” “me,” “I remember.” I’m gonna start doing things like that because I had to get rid of imposter syndrome. I had to get rid of the whole journalistic mindset of, “Okay, my name is small at the top of this article for a reason because nobody cares what I think.” No, my name is gonna be big as hell on the front of this cover, and so, I need to really take ownership over this narrative.
So, that’s what I decided to do. I just decided to write the history as I knew it. And I’m gonna say something. I’m going to preface it by saying, and I’m not comparing myself to this guy at all, but what I told my editor was, “I’m gonna Greg Tate this situation.” When you read Tate, Tate is very authoritative, and he’s like, “This is what it is. This is what I know it to be, and that’s it.” So, I decided to do the same thing and follow his lead on that. It’s my history, too. Write it like you were there because I was outside. I may have been younger, but I was outside as well, and I was absorbing all this music like everybody else.
Grief is not linear but is often deeply personal. The prologue to High and Rising opens with a memory of The DA.I.S.Y Experience at Webster Hall, and the book ends with a poignant note to Dave, raw reminders of the reality that he is no longer with us. How has writing this book helped you find solace in your memories of him, as well as those of your mother and others you have loved and lost?
Marcus J. Moore: Well, I feel like it’s gonna be sort of a multi-part-thing. I think, of the people you mentioned in your question, it helped me resolve my grief around Dave the most because, I mean, obviously it was a book about De La Soul. And when Dave passed, I felt a wave of grief that I wasn’t really expecting because when I think about Dave, I also think about my older cousin Eric who was also of that age and passed a few years before Dave. I remember Dave and my cousin Eric being of that same generation, may have even been the same age, and it felt like my cousin passing away all over again. So, I felt, in a weird way, like writing that letter to Dave was also writing a letter to my cousin Eric because they’re essentially the same cat. So, it helped me realize that we only get one crack at life, and you gotta learn to make the most of it. And I feel like Dave, even though he passed really young, made the most of his time here just like my cousin Eric made the most of his time.
If anything, and also with my mom, it just helped me realize that life is fleeting. You can be here, and then one day, you’re not here. So, while you’re here, you owe it to yourself to pursue your happiness. You owe it to yourself to see your ideas through to the end and do the best that you can because none of us leave out with the right answers. It just kind of helped me to write the letter and deal with that grief and helped me to understand that you gotta lean into life as much as you can.
So, that’s what I’ve been doing, and that’s what I’m gonna be doing in my next book, too, which will get announced soon. It’s about me and my mom’s relationship through music. That’s the first of the two books. It’s about that, and it’s helping me realize that, look, this isn’t to say that I’m about to do anything crazy, but when you see death happen to your most cherished loved one, it really doesn’t make you fearful. You’re living fearlessly. And again, I’m not about to go out here and run into the middle of the street, but at the same time, death is not this thing that I’m afraid of because when you see it happen, it just kind of changes your perspective in a real way. So, writing about it, and then also writing about how I saw it happen, has been life-altering for me in so many different ways.
Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time. Are there any other projects coming in 2025 you want to promote?
Marcus J. Moore: The next book right now is titled Songs For My Mother from The Horace Silver Quintet, “Song For My Father,” but it’s about me writing a letter to my mom, wherever she is now, about our relationship to music. Basically, how she put me onto music, but then, as she got older, how I put her onto music. So, it’s about how she put me onto actual Stevie Wonder B-sides and Elton John, James Brown, Al Green, The Isley Brothers, Madonna. But then one time, she took my Mos Def CD, Black on Both Sides. She also loved The New Danger. Then I put her onto James Blake, and I put her onto Bon Iver. So, it’s this evolution. And then, the second book is an authorized biography of Max Roach.
Oh, wow! I remember reading your 5 Minutes about him.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, so I’m finally gonna write my jazz book because a lot of the jazz homies are like, “Yo, you’re a jazz dude, but you haven’t written a jazz book yet.” I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right but just stick with me. It’s coming soon.” So, that’s the next thing. And then curating a show for Winter Jazzfest that celebrates Strata-East Records. Other than that, I’m just kind of laying low. That’s on purpose.
Oh, yeah, ‘cause you have time to lay low with all that.
Marcus J. Moore: Yeah, I’m already working on Book #3 in a real way.