Hey I'm Brian Hyatt and this is Rolling Stone Music Now. I'm really happy to have with me Marcus

J Moore, who is the author of a new book I really enjoyed called The Butterfly Effect,

how Kendrick Lamar ignited the soul of Black America

and it's a really interesting look at one of the most important artists of the centuries so far.

Someone I've interviewed before and has always dazzled me with this genius and has made just

classic album after classic album. first of all welcome Marcus.

Thank you thanks for having me.

The thing about this book is it's not a straight biography of Kendrick by any means

it has a lot of biographical information but what it really is is a look at a couple things that how his artistry developed how he made these classic albums and also how it intersected with this political moment in the United States.

How did you get the idea to approach it that way?

Well, because I knew that, I knew that this was going to be the first book theoretically

it was going to be the first book on Kendrick Lamar ever so I knew that it was

probably too soon to write just a straightforward biography, you know, page one.

He's born in his hospital, page 250, here he is with the Pulitzer.

I didn't want to do that.

But I also knew that, like just as a fan,

that his music always sort of intersects, you know, it has

its sort of social political aspect to it as well and you can't talk about

his music without talking about Trayvon or talking about the killing of unarmed black men and women

You can't discuss it without that and so I figure you know even though it's recent history, it was history that still

needed to be told. And, you know, people forget, I mean, because in the age of

social media, everything moves so quickly that you kind of forget what went on like even a week ago or two weeks ago.

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