September Rawrrzone Spotlight: Jeffrey Roe on Hip-Hop, Cultura & the Meaning of Community
In the Rawrrzone, we recently had the chance to virtually connect with Jeffrey Roe of Beats, Rhymes y Communidad. Since our first interaction, we've noticed his strong emphasis on community. With Irish Nuyorican roots, he embraces the philosophy once expressed by the legendary Joe Conzo: Hip-Hop is Colorless. Inspired by this belief, he has pursued his work with a heart-centered approach to community building. For over 15 years, he has successfully helped numerous brands like SiriusXM, Meta, Best Buy, H&R Block, Bayer, and others achieve measurable business growth by nurturing meaningful relationships with their customers. Alongside his consultancy and podcast, he plays a role in building communities around pioneering shows such as The Rap Dads Show, Sway in the Morning, and CTRL, ALT, D-Stroy. His recent article The Internet Killed the Neighborhood. Did It Kill Online Communities Too?” explores the shift in community dynamics with the rise of the internet and cloud platforms. His efforts to bridge the gap and continue promoting the mantra that it takes a village to raise a child earned him our September Rawrrzone Spotlight for Hispanic Heritage Month.
For somebody discovering Jeffrey Roe for the first time, who are you beyond the résumé and the professional titles?
First and foremost, I’m a father. Outside of work, I’m a concert junkie, aspiring filmmaker, and self-proclaimed funny guy.
You describe yourself as an Irish Nuyorican, born in Manhattan and raised in Jersey City. During Hispanic Heritage Month, what does being Nuyorican mean to you personally?
Nuyoricans are a unique faction of Puerto Rican pioneers who used their God given talents to turn the working-class immigrant experience, poverty, and discrimination into art. As a third-generation Nuyorican standing on the shoulders of his ancestors, I think honoring that legacy not only means fulfilling the potential of my own God given talents, but also transcending the diasporic divide that colonization imposed on Puerto Ricans.
Being Irish and Puerto Rican in New Jersey how did these cultures coexist in your household and shape who you are?
I wouldn’t say they had much of an opportunity to coexist in my household a whole lot, if at all. Growing up, I was primarily influenced by my mother’s Puerto Rican side and later my stepfather’s Dominican side (my parents separated when I was 5). That meant lots of house parties in Washington Heights and family get-togethers in Jersey fueled by Salsa, Merengue, and amazing food.
My mother has a wide palette for music, so she exposed me to a lot of R&B, Jazz, Disco, and Soul. She was also entrenched in culture and had a lot of friends who were either musicians or artists. By the time I was 13, I was going to gallery exhibits and places like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater. To round out those influences, my abuela Milagros had us all listening to Top 40 artists from her era like Perry Como while she was simultaneously partying at the Palladium and making friends with people like Machito and Graciela who were pioneers of the Latin Jazz movement in NYC during the 1940s.
Outside of putting on his best Irish accent every St. Patrick’s Day, my father’s influence when it came to culture was primarily imparted through his taste in music which mostly consisted of Classic and Alternative Rock (we weren’t exactly Riverdancing together). The relationships on my father’s side of the family were also not as closely knit as those on my mother’s side, which I think contributed to my being a little out of touch with my Irish side. However, my aunt worked in theater for a period of her life and introduced me to Broadway, taking me to see shows like STOMP and Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk.
I definitely developed a sense of identity rooted in both cultures as the years went on through the environments and people I experienced between Jersey and NYC. One thing that helped was both my parents told me a lot of stories about my grandma Roe so I related heavily to her Irish spirit of gritty rebelliousness and sense of humor. It wasn’t until recent years, though, that I learned about the shared history between Puerto Ricans & the Irish and things like Pedro Albizu Campos joining forces with Irish activists during his time at Harvard. I’m now more curious to learn about my Irish heritage than ever.
New York and New Jersey have historically created spaces where Caribbean, Latino and Black cultures constantly interact. How did growing up around that cultural exchange shape your understanding of Hip-Hop?
It didn’t at first. Although my mother introduced me to Hip-Hop at a young age, she was more of a casual participant in the culture which translated into me initially perceiving Hip-Hop as just mainstream Rap music. Growing up in a melting pot that stretched beyond Latino and Black cultures simply shaped how I understood the world to be.
It wasn’t until I started digging in the crates independently that I began connecting the dots of Hip-Hop’s history and understanding that the culture was born out of community. At that point, my attention shifted to this symbiosis and my relationship with Hip-Hop deepened in a much more intimate way. I guess you could say Hip-Hop helped shape my understanding of community and the two validated each other in my mind once I matured to a level where I could truly appreciate them both holistically.
You studied under KRS-One and the Temple of Hip-Hop and became a Hip-Hop Cultural Specialist. What did that experience teach you about Hip-Hop that you didn't fully understand before?
I think the biggest takeaway for me was gaining a better understanding about the elements of the culture, specifically the ones beyond the core four most people think about first. Learning about principles like Knowledge of Self and Street Entrepreneurship resonated with me deeply. I suppose that’s because I’ve entered into a season of my life where my personal and professional development have become inextricably intertwined.
You wrote something that immediately stood out to us: “Community was Hip-Hop's first product.” What does that statement mean to you?
If we think about the way corporations have historically been dominated by the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, it’s easy to understand the opportunity that Hip-Hop presented as it grew into an emerging market. A multi-faceted culture that could be monetized element by element? And one of those elements is a music genre that could be further dissected into sub-genres thereby creating multiple revenue streams?
Sounds like a capitalist’s dream come true.
But if Hip-Hop was born out of community, how’s the productization of our community working out 53 years after the fact? In 2026, I’m seeing a lot more conversations about the culture that are salacious and divisive than ones that uplift and push the culture forward. Now think about the impact other industries have had on communities, specifically the marginalized and underrepresented ones. How have they been impacted by being commodified across industries like real estate, food, healthcare, etc.?
From where I’m standing, it seems the corporate machine identified community as a vehicle for business development a long time ago. The more diverse and culturally rich the community, the more avenues for monetization it potentially possesses. And all the while, divide and conquer is the growth hack sitting behind the wheel.
Before Hip-Hop became a multibillion-dollar global industry, it was people gathering together and creating something with the resources they had. What can today's creators learn from that original community mentality?
The biggest lesson I think they could learn is that the highest levels of creativity are born out of scarcity. The problem is today’s creators have so many resources at their fingertips, it’s hard to know if they’d willingly put themselves in a position to actually learn that lesson.
Also, gathering together for the sole purpose of creating something from nothing could do a lot to restore that original community mentality and spirit of collaboration. Our definitions for both have become so bastardized in a today’s world where community is synonymous with follower counts and collaborating is as simple as tagging someone on IG.
You connect the four elements of Hip-Hop to community management: the DJ builds the foundation, the MC becomes the voice, graffiti creates edutainment, and breaking facilitates connection. How did you make that connection?
The community management industry kind of made the connection for me. I’ve been building and managing online communities on behalf of corporations for most of my career, and oftentimes my colleagues will liken building a digital community to setting up for a party. With that premise in mind and looking at community management through the lens of Hip-Hop, I decided to reframe the connection by mapping four of the most important pillars for online community building to the core four elements of Hip-Hop.
Let's start with the DJ. You argue that community builders should meet people where they already are rather than immediately forcing them onto a new platform. Why is that so important?
Rule number one of online community building is understanding that whatever community you’re trying to build already exists. Your members are somewhere on the internet right now chatting about whatever topic, interest, or purpose you’re trying to build a community around. One of your first tasks as the builder is to identify where that conversation is taking place and earn a seat at the table.
From there, you can begin establishing connections, building relationships, and thinking about what another home for that community might look like. No one’s going to leave their Facebook Group for your Discord community if they never used Discord before and don’t trust you.
If we’re thinking about this concept through the lens of Hip-Hop, it doesn’t matter whether the DJ’s playing in a park, the community room at the lobby level of an apartment building, or at Madison Square Garden. What matters is that the music slaps, the people are fun to be around, and you’re having a good time. No one’s going to believe you know where the better party’s at if they’ve never seen you at one before.
Online community builders must prioritize creating a frictionless, safe, and valuable experience for members in order for their communities to succeed.
You describe the community manager almost like an MC—the person with the microphone who also needs to know when to speak and when to step back. What separates a great community leader from someone who simply wants to control the conversation?
Knowing when to shut up and listen. As community managers, it’s not our job to answer every question or be the smartest person in the room. Community managers are the connective tissue in communities that help facilitate connections, learning, and growth for their members (and the business if you’re building professionally).
No one likes a person who thinks they’re a know-it-all. Attempting to control the conversation will ultimately turn your members off and cause them to churn. In the same way an MC knows the art of crowd control, a great community leader understands the art of moderating a conversation in a way that keeps it fluid, productive, and safe.
When you talk about graffiti, you connect it with edutainment and meaningful content. In an era where everyone is chasing viral content, how do creators make something memorable without sacrificing substance?
By understanding that substance is what makes content memorable. Everyone’s a creator until an artist walks in the room, and while the creator economy may be booming, the attention economy is also dying.
We’re now shifting into an era where consumers value content that’s useful in that it exhibits expertise, personality, trust, and community. This isn’t to say that attention will stop being important, but its scale won’t matter nearly as much as it has with virality and follower counts continuing to lose their relevance.
Breaking is your metaphor for member-to-member connection. Why is a community stronger when its members begin building relationships independently of the person or brand that originally brought them together?
Because true community doesn’t exist without a sense of belonging, and that doesn’t happen until members connect with each other. Anything before that is simply an audience.
Belonging isn’t something any one person or brand can manufacture. However, great community builders set the stage for belonging to grow by leading with purpose.
Social media has conditioned creators to obsess over views, likes, followers and algorithms. What metrics should someone look at if they actually want to measure community?
That’s a great question because community platforms have their own set of vanity metrics that on their own aren’t necessarily an accurate benchmark for success.
The business use case for launching an online community might be to reduce support demand, improve customer retention, surface product insights, create advocates, accelerate onboarding, generate referrals, or strengthen relationships that eventually influence revenue. Some of the metrics used to measure how effectively a community is doing any one of these things might be monthly active users (MAU), click rate if you run a newsletter, or bounce rate if you host a website.
Let’s use the example of reducing support demand. Say you’re a tech company and you launch a community so your customers can ask each other questions about how to use your software. If your customers are connecting independently and answering each other’s questions in your community, guess what they’re not doing? They’re not hitting up your Support team to open up a ticket about their question. This is a metric called case deflection that’s used to measure cost of labor savings by comparing the number of questions answered in the community vs. the number of cases opened by Support.
Of course, using data to measure the success of anything involves combining quantitative and qualitative data to tell a story. The qualitative side is where you can begin to measure community health from a connection and belonging standpoint, but it’s hard work because you’re having to quantify anecdotal information like testimonials or member-to-member engagements.
All of this is to say that measuring community looks different depending on the goals and objectives of your community. There are solid frameworks for measuring it, but it’s rarely ever a one-size-fits-all approach.
What does healthy community growth look like?
I actually developed a framework for healthy community growth called the Fiestalegre Community Flywheel. It’s a blueprint that breaks sustainable community building into five stages:
Root clarifies purpose, values, and cultural context so you know who this community is actually for and why they would choose you.
Design architects the platforms, pathways, and participation paths members will move through.
Activate launches the programming, storytelling, and rituals that give people a reason to come back.
Sustain puts governance, leadership, and measurements in place so the community holds together after the launch energy fades.
Amplify turns the community into the engine through media, partnerships, and growth.
Your article asks a powerful question: “The Internet Killed the Neighborhood. Did It Kill Online Communities Too?” What made that question hit you strongly enough to write about it?
Listening to Marlon Craft’s latest album, The Internet Killed the Neighborhood. In addition to it being a top to bottom no skip album which is super rare these days, the subject matter and Marlon’s execution on every track absolutely floored me.
The way he mourns the loss of IRL communities due to the rise of technology and social media had me reflecting on my career so hard I was compelled to write about it. The article is part album review, part analysis of the creator economy as it relates to online community building.
At the same time, the internet has allowed a kid in Puerto Rico, New York, California or another country to find people who share their interests instantly. What has digital community given us that traditional neighborhoods couldn't?
I think it’s given us the ability to expand our horizons beyond the traditional neighborhoods we grew up in. They say travel is the greatest teacher, but we’re not all jetsetters and not all of us were born in New York. So for that kid in small-town middle America who grew up getting bullied for loving Hip-Hop, the internet has allowed for that kid to feel validated. In the same way, digital community has given us the opportunity to learn from the lived experiences of people we otherwise would have never known.
Memberships, Patreon-style subscriptions, Discords and paid fan communities are everywhere now. At what point does a community become primarily a customer base? In addition, why is it important that every conversation interaction or relationship become a revenue or content generating opportunity?
Community becomes a customer base when profits are prioritized over people. I would argue that it’s not important for every engagement to become a revenue or content generating opportunity. In fact, the exact opposite is what’s important to maintaining the essence of true community.
This isn’t to say that monetizing community is evil. I simply mean you can provide value to your community and generate revenue from it at the same time. But if you’re exploiting engagement at every turn, what’s left for your members? A certain level of privacy and exclusivity is key to maintaining intimacy and belonging in community.
With AI-generated content, algorithms and increasingly personalized feeds, do you think genuine human community is becoming more valuable precisely because technology is becoming more dominant?
Absolutely! It’s the exact reason why I said the attention economy is dying earlier. It’s also why IRL experiences, third places, and people switching back to analog media & devices are on the rise (among other trends signaling this shift).
Your podcast is called Beats, Rhymes y Comunidad. Why was it important to put comunidad directly in the title?
Firstly, because almost all of the other podcasts about professional community management have the word ‘Community’ in their titles, so it was important for me to come up with a name that said community without saying ‘Community’.
Secondly, I wanted to inject some of my own culture into the title and it turned out coming up with a Spanglish name for the show was the perfect way to do that.
What conversations did you feel were missing from both the Hip-Hop world and professional community-management world that made you want to create the show? And do you see Beats, Rhymes y Comunidad as more than a podcast—potentially becoming its own community or cultural platform?
In a nutshell, I feel conversations about professional community management are missing from the Hip-Hop world and vice versa. Even though community management has been a viable career path for well over 20 years, it’s still very much an emerging industry. BRC is my attempt at bringing my expertise back to Hip-Hop in an effort to contribute to the culture while delivering a fresh and entertaining perspective about community management to the professional world.
I definitely have a vision for building a community around either the show or my consultancy, but I’m currently somewhere in between the Root, Design, and Activate stages of my journey so there’s still a lot of work to do before that vision is fully fleshed out.
Hip-Hop was created by Black and Latino young people but eventually became a global commercial force. How do we preserve cultural memory as generations get further removed from Hip-Hop's beginnings?
Document and share! I saw a post on IG the other day about a gentleman by the name of Brian Nagata who has a collection of over 5,000 Hip-Hop magazines. This guy has arguably one of Hip-Hop’s most important independent archives, preserving a version of its history that can’t always be found through an internet search. Digitizing and indexing those archives would not only do wonders for preserving cultural memory by making it more widely accessible, but it would also help bring future generations back to the principles of Hip-Hop’s beginnings.
You've built your career around this idea of community. Has there ever been a period in your own life when you didn't feel like you had one? What does belonging mean to you?
Community work is ironically isolating. I can’t recall a period when I wasn’t part of a community. It’s the belonging part that’s remained somewhat elusive. Belonging to me means having a sense of fellowship that makes you feel accepted, where you can show up as your most authentic self and still feel like you’re a part of something that’s bigger than yourself.
While I don’t recall a period when I didn’t feel like I had a community I could rely on, I don’t know that there’s been a single community I’ve been a part of that’s made me feel like I 100% fit in.
When you think about Puerto Rican contributions to Hip-Hop, whose stories do you believe deserve more attention?
Crazy Legs, D-Stroy, and Tony Touch are my big three in this department.
What responsibility do people who document, teach and work within Hip-Hop have to make sure Latino contributions aren't erased from the larger history of the culture?
The responsibility people have is that of exercising due diligence and not editorializing the way the culture is documented, taught, and worked to suit any form of hidden agenda that might jeopardize telling the whole story, whether it be about Latino’s contributions or any other demographic’s.
When people look back at Jeffrey Roe's work years from now, what do you hope they say you contributed to Hip-Hop, Latino culture and the communities you served?
I hope they say I contributed the kind of value that brought joy, healing, and progress to the communities I served.
Finish this sentence: “For me, comunidad is…
CULTURA!”
Follow him on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jerseycityjeff/
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