#19: Raymond — Music, Media, AI
After a 14-year hiatus, one of the coolest music magazines is making a comeback...on Substack.
Welcome to Mia’s Queue, a newsletter spotlighting the secret agents of taste among us. In each edition, I chat with an undercover tastemaker infusing creativity and wonder into their (and our!) everyday life. Learn what lights them up, where they find inspiration, and what they think we should all be enjoying right now. Meet Agent 019: Raymond Roker, founder of
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Back in the day, I revered music media and wrote for publications like NME.com, Magnet, and URB. Focusing on underground culture and subcultures, URB always felt cooler than I ever hoped to be. It put people like M.I.A. and DJ Shadow on the cover and was an indispensable guide to rising stars in hip-hop and electronic music. I was proud that a few of my words made it to URB’s storied pages.
One person whose journey I’ve followed since then is URB’s founder, Raymond Roker. Thanks to him, URB thrived for nearly two decades and did its part to show that West Coast culture was just as vibrant as what was happening in New York City. Raymond went on to have leadership roles at AEG, Goldenvoice, Coachella, and Amazon Music.
Now, after a 14-year hiatus, Raymond is resurrecting URB through Substack. The L.A. native is revisiting archives, perusing pictures, and examining the magazine’s coverage from the 1990s and early 00s with fresh eyes. He’s just passed 1,000 subscribers here and is embracing life as a creator. I’m excited for him and can’t wait to see how he brings this beloved brand back to life.
How have your tastes evolved since URB’s founding in 1990?
I would argue that I like the same things in many ways. I still feel like I have to caveat my taste, but I grew up on everything. I grew up in the 70s so I listen to a lot of 70s FM radio — everything from Elton John to Led Zeppelin to Harry Chapin to Jim Croce…the full gamut.
And then, being a kid in the 80s, discovering hip-hop, of course. I lived through the explosion of what hip-hop came to mean, and I continue to be surprised and enraptured by new sounds. If you look at my desktop right now, I'll have SoundCloud open to stay at that fun, bleeding-edge discovery mode. And then I'll have Spotify open with my tried-and-true playlists. Or I'll have Apple up for mixes and discovery in a different way, with DJ sets and things that reflect my mood.
Whenever anybody asks me who's my favorite artist, it’s Black Sabbath. I still love them. I don't always listen to Sabbath. I might want to listen to Jay-Z or drum and bass. It depends on my mood. And that's what I like to reflect on my playlists. The vibe of that moment.
Does any of your music discovery come from the music press these days?
The tiniest bits. For whatever reason, I decided to pay for four or five music subscription services, so I siphon off knowledge from those.
Every year I go to Coachella and walk away with three or four really exciting discoveries or renewed appreciation of artists that maybe I was familiar with but didn't quite fall in love with. That sets me up for a year because those beget other artists — that's usually my discovery process.
It's so tough to be in the business of music writing. And it's why, frankly, I'm not making that what URB is about now. It's more about ideas and nostalgia but reflecting through a new lens on the past and contextualizing it in ways that we didn't know at the time. It’s quite a cathartic exercise because when I read even tiny little things that I used to write, while I know exactly what I meant by it, some of it is cringy. I wouldn't talk that way right now. Even as progressive as we were, we still reflected signs of the times.
I always laugh when people have these rose-tinted glasses that the 90s were so progressive. It was a sexist time. We just did a retrospective on a cover that we had in 2000. The cover reflected the male gaze of the moment in electronic music and how all the covers of compilations had women in bikinis. And we then did a cover with women in bikinis. Now, looking back, it's one of the covers that I'm the most sort of eek about even though it was our biggest issue. It was a healthy dialogue for me to have and for me to bring to readers. If I'm doing anything with the archive that's honest, it has to also involve taking a look critically at what we did.
What kind of rituals do you have around finding and organizing inspiration and then sharing it back out in the world?
I don't know that I have a set ritual. I’m always open to what surfaces on social. I follow a variety of things on my personal Instagram and URB’s Instagram. I like discovering things that helped me solidify a perspective that I either would have liked to have shared or someone else did. I'm excited to share it almost like co-signing.
But if you see the [physical] space that I'm in, I'm surrounded by hundreds of books and magazines, 10s of thousands of photos, and 1000s of pages that we've printed over the years. I'm not constantly scratching at the door of What's New. I'm looking laterally and behind me to contextualize where we've been. A lot of it is presenting historic material but in a new way. That, to me, is a discovery itself.
What are some of your passions outside of music and media?
I love photography. If I could have figured out a way to make a living at it, I probably would have done more of that.
I have been DJing for years and still love the feeling of putting together music and mixes and compilations and playlists. Over COVID, I finally committed myself to figuring out how to use software to make a loop and assemble a track. That was a huge breakthrough. I enjoyed doing that. I've made a few things and posted them on SoundCloud.
I'm also raising two daughters, nine and 11. I get a lot of inspiration from watching their creativity and watching their eyes open.
Maybe the most intensive thing that I'm learning about now in my post-education journey is AI. I find it beautifully ironic that what it's so good at is also the stuff that I used to think I was so good at and how I've had to challenge myself to use it to be better than I am.
What have you taught your girls about taste, culture, and curation?
Well, that's a really good question. When you have young kids, I think there are two ways to parent: one way is you put them in front of the turntables, and you put on your vintage vinyl, and you make sure they know how to put the record on and you do all this stuff. You bring them onto your side and your way of thinking; nothing wrong with that. I didn't do any of that stuff. I’m too busy being a parent, my turntables weren't plugged in, and I don't want them effing up my vinyl anyway. [Laughs]
What happens? They came home from preschool one day, singing the soundtrack from “Hair,” one of my favorite musicals of all time. They knew the song from “Grease,” they knew the Tom Petty song that I love…Your kids will discover through society and osmosis many of the good things that you appreciate. If you just are there, they will emulate what they see, whether you've forced-fed it to them or not. So my curation for them has been slow and steady, not heavy-handed.
They can't help but come into my den, my studio, and be mesmerized by how much is here. I want to leave them an organized archive someday, backed up and safe in the cloud. I hope they can appreciate what's here without being inundated with stuff that just doesn't make any sense to them. Hopefully, it's in other places like libraries and museum collections.
Strangely enough, part of my work that I think about is looking after and curating the archive, delivering the next phase. The Substack is more than a business venture; it's been more like a blog to track the progress of what I'm doing with the URB archives.
Alright, now let’s get to your recommendations of things you want people to check out because you love them so much?
📺 Narcos
It’s just sublime. It’s got beautiful cinematography, storytelling, an ensemble cast… it’s an incredibly rich and textured drug gang drama. I finally finished it after milking it out as long as I could.
🤖 Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI
Everybody should be paying attention to Emad. I mean, Sam Altman from Open AI gives great talks and interviews — everybody should be listening to Sam Altman right now for sure — but I find that Emad’s way of summarizing the immense impact that AI is having, and will have in the near future, is must-see TV at this point.
💲📕 “The Psychology of Money” by Morgan Housel
A book about how we think about money and the ways that our upbringing, family influences, and personal experiences drive how we act with money. The better we can understand all of those conscious and unconscious behaviors, the better off we'll be building wealth. So it's a really good book and also really short.
• The best place to follow Raymond is at right here on Substack.
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