Wes Moore’s mother realized her son didn’t have learning differences after he recited every Chubb Rock lyric perfectly, sparking his lifelong mission to protect Hip-Hop in courts.
Wes Moore proved something profound on the Track Star Podcast that most people never understand about how their brains actually work.
When teachers told his mother he had learning differences, she didn’t accept that diagnosis.
Then Chubb Rock’s “Treat ‘Em Right” came on the radio and Moore recited every single lyric perfectly. His mother’s realization hit different. The problem wasn’t his brain. It was the delivery.
He learned through music, and that moment shaped everything about how he’d eventually lead a state.
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That same understanding of hip-hop’s power drove Moore to sign the PACE Act into law in Maryland, making the state one of only three in the nation to protect artists’ creative expression from being weaponized in court. The numbers tell a story that shouldn’t exist. Hip-hop lyrics were used over 840 times to prosecute people. Every other musical genre combined? Four times. “This is not a coincidence. This is bias,” Moore said when he signed the bill. “In Maryland, that ends today.”
Moore’s connection to Hip-Hop runs deeper than policy. Growing up, everything from Motown to gospel played in his home, but hip-hop hit different.
“Hip-Hop was almost a way to explain my world to a wider audience,” he said on the podcast. “It was a chance for you to kind of talk about who you are, what your hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears were, but do it to a beat.”
Notorious B.I.G. became a major influence. Wes Moore can still recite Biggie’s lyrics decades later.
“You could literally just push play on Biggie’s albums right now and not skip a song and still have songs that would be classics right now,” Wes Moore said. “Everything that he says is crystal clear. He’s painting this picture that you can see and that’s what makes him such a brilliant lyricist.”
Moore’s path to the governor’s office wasn’t straight. His father died when he was three. His family moved to the Bronx.
He bounced between schools, feeling too poor for some kids and too rich for others. At 13, he got sent to military school and ran away five times in the first four days.
But something shifted. He found a sense of belonging and a sense of collective responsibility. By the end of that first year, he chose to stay. His mother could finally say, “He’s doing well,” and mean it.
That experience shaped his entire vision for Maryland. Moore served as a Rhodes Scholar, attended Johns Hopkins University, and worked as an investment banker before becoming CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation in New York, where he raised over $650 million to fight poverty. But he knew where his real calling was.
“I knew that I wanted to run specifically for governor because I knew so many of the policies that were hurting our communities were being made from a governor’s office,” he said. He became Maryland’s first Black governor in 2023, and his administration has made historic investments in violence prevention, cutting Maryland’s violent crime rate in half.
Baltimore, which was averaging about a homicide a day in 2022, has seen one of the fastest drops in the country. The last time the homicide rate was this low, Wes Moore wasn’t even born yet.
Music keeps him optimistic. He wakes up to songs like “Optimistic” by Sounds of Blackness and “Blue Magic” by Jay-Z.
“Music is infused in everything that I do,” Moore said. He knows history too. America has faced difficult times before.
“Despite all of that, it’s like still I rise. And with that, I think that kind of is what gives me the understanding that, you know, in the words of Kendrick Lamar, you know, we going to be all right,” he said.
Hip-hop’s role in criminal justice reform has become increasingly important as more states recognize the bias. Moore’s PACE Act requires judges to rule that lyrics are literal statements, refer to the facts of the case, and are relevant to disputed facts before they can be admitted at trial.
