Irwin Chusid (born April 22, 1951, Newark, New Jersey) is a journalist, music historian, radio personality and self-described "landmark preservationist." His stated mission has been to "find things on the scrapheap of history that I know don't belong there and salvage them." Those "things" have included such previously overlooked but now-celebrated icons as composer/bandleader/electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, Space Age Pop avatar Esquivel, illustrator/fine artist Jim Flora, various outsider musicians (including William "Shooby" Taylor, a.k.a. "The Human Horn"), and The Langley Schools Music Project. Chusid calls himself "a connoisseur of marginalia," while admitting he's "a terrible barometer of popular taste."
His journalism has appeared in Mojo, The New York Times, Film Comment, Mix magazine, New York Press, Pulse! and other publications. He has lived in Hoboken, New Jersey since 1992. He describes his political views as "leaning libertarian."
Since 1975 Chusid has been a DJ on free-form radio station WFMU, where he continues to host an unpredictable and idiosyncratic weekly program whose content he calls "genre-surfing tokenism". Prior to that, he worked briefly at WPKN radio from 1969-1971 while an undergrad at the University of Bridgeport (which he left after two years); in 1977, while living in New Orleans, he hosted a weekly program on WTUL. In 1988, he served as a comedy writer for author/humorist Tom Bodett's syndicated radio series, The End of the Road.