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“Out Late” is Time Out’s nightlife and party column by DJ, Whorechata founder and Time Out New York Culture Editor Ian Kumamoto, and is published every other Tuesday. The previous edition was about the NYC parties shaping a new Arab American identity.
Throughout the 2010s, DJs like Tiësto, Diplo and Avicii were selling out stadiums and reaching levels of celebrityhood rivaled today only by the likes of Taylor Swift. They cemented the image of successful DJs as cool, straight white dudes who pumped their fists and jumped up and down in front of seas of fans.
And then 2020 happened, which brought with it a massive cultural shift in American cities like New York. The protests for George Floyd led to a reckoning that too many talented artists had been kept from opportunities simply because they didn't have the right connections. On a microlevel, that awareness became clear in Bushwick's nightclubs: More and more women and Black DJs began to populate lineups, further fueled by an ecosystem of Black-centered parties like Everyday People, Dick Appointment, Raw Honey and many others.
Today, we're finally starting to see the fruits of that movement—so much so that a huge part of Brooklyn's club scene is driven by Black artists like Honey Bun, Bodegaparty and Dada Cozmic, who came up at a time when they were encouraged to challenge the status quo and empowered to create the nightlife spaces they wanted to see. They also represent a new generation of DJs fueled by the awareness that house, techno, Jersey Club and other club genres have their roots in Black communities.
Honey Bun, a DJ who hosts a Black-centered Lot Radio show Buntopia and a Boiler Room alumn, first learned about the Black people's connection to club culture when she attended NYU. There, she studied Afro-futurism, a framework that imagines a liberated future for Black people that will be achieved through art, creativity and activism, per the National Museum of African American History and Culture. "As a Black person, you think about how much our history has been claimed by others," she says. "I felt a sense of ownership and anger that our influence on so many of these genres had been erased."
“I felt a sense of ownership and anger that our influence on so many of these genres had been erased.”
A prime example of this erasure is the origins of techno, a dark, percussion and synthesizer-heavy genre that began in Detroit as a spinoff on EDM. Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, who formed the Belleville Three, began pushing the genre forward as we know it today. Although techno was essentially founded by three Black friends from Michigan, a majority of the world's highest-earning techno producers today are non-Black and based in Europe.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Bodegaparty always loved techno, which she says always helped her focus and keep her ADHD in check while she studied for exams in high school. In 2021, she began DJing her friends' DIY parties and then her own event, Off the Clock. It was then that she experimented blending electronic and techno with music from the ballroom scene and hip-hop, just to see what hit. She attributes her success as a DJ to the fact that she came into a scene that actually embraced and sometimes even prioritized women DJs—a sense of openness and flexibility that most prestigious clubs lacked before the pandemic. "I have a privilege of being able to choose to interact with femmes and women," she tells Time Out New York. Bodegaparty notes that from her experience, women DJs and producers tend to be more flexible and in tune with what a crowd is feeling.
Bodegaparty categorizes herself as a "new age DJ" which she defines as anyone who started DJing after the pandemic. These DJs are characterized by a willingness to be genre-agnostic in their sets, explore a range of cultures in their sounds and are overall less self-serious than older DJs, who tend to be salty about how accessible DJing has become (they apparently disparagingly call younger DJs "COVID DJs"). "I think they're just jaded," Bodegaparty says. "With the constant progression of technology of course it will seem to them like DJing is too easy now, but you can't teach creativity."
“I think they're just jaded … you can't teach creativity.”
It's that creativity, innovation, and desire to try new things that has come to shape this cohort of New York DJs. Dada Cozmic was born and raised in the Bronx and first learned to DJ in 2018 through her peers, which included the duo Dos Flakos. "I'm very grateful to be part of this generation because I've been able to create the spaces I want to be in," she tells us. Although she has been part of male and white-dominated nightlife spaces before, she never felt like the need to appease to them in order to grow in her music career—a huge testament to how much the culture has changed. "I can't feel left out of something I don't desire to be a part of."
Despite all the its ills, Dada Cozmic is excited for the future of NYC nightlife—she thinks we're starting to go back to a way things were before we had access to so much technology. Increasingly, parties are encouraging people to be more present and put their phones away while dancing. "I need people to keep making fun of an audience that has their phones out," she says. "Slowly but surely, we're going back to a more analog way of existing with each other."
At a time when DJing has become the quintessential Bushwick hobby and a punchline for any perceived deadbeats, a new generation of Black New York DJs are engaging with their art form in a way that is thoughtful, historically aware and pushes the envelope. If DJing in the 2010s was stuffy and filled with rules, this decade's DJs are uncompromising about their authenticity. Most importantly, though, they're having a lot of fun.
Here's how to see these DJs
Dada Cozmic: Follow her on Instagram and keep an eye out for her first EP, which is coming out in June.
Honey Bun: Follow her on Instagram. She is DJing for Soul Connection at Nowadays this Friday, Valentine's Day.
Bodegaparty: Follow her on Instagram.