Scenes From Bushwick’s Cowboy Carter Club Rodeo
At around 11:30 p.m. last Friday night in Brooklyn, throngs of people gathered around the front of 3 Dollar Bill, a queer Bushwick nightclub. The beat of Beyoncé’s “Alien Superstar” could be heard through the front door. “Oh my God, they are playing Renaissance,” someone yelled as the crowd — dressed in their “kunty country-club best” of silver-fringe-embellished cowboy hats, tight light-wash boot-cut jeans, chaps, and embroidered yoke shirts — moved along. They were all waiting to get into Act II: Club Rodeo, a Cowboy Carter listening party. “We have to get inside!” someone else screamed.
DJs Arty Furtado and Miss Milan have been organizing Beyoncé-themed listening parties since the club-ready Renaissance album first dropped in July 2022. “It was really an impulsive moment, where I was having a meeting at a venue and looked at their calendar and saw they didn’t have anything planned for the album,” said Furtado, who has been a lifelong Beyoncé fan. Within an hour, he had made a bare-bones flyer and posted a link for $5 tickets. Three hours later, the Williamsburg venue for that first party, Baby’s All Right, sold out.
It quickly became a series, in which the featured album was played top to bottom with no skips or on-the-mic interruptions, culminating in a first-anniversary fête hosted on a boat that sailed around Manhattan while playing the album.
With Beyoncé’s new country-themed album came Club Rodeo and a much larger crowd — according to Milan, the capacity of Baby’s All Right is about 300, but almost 800 people bought tickets for the March 29 party at 3 Dollar Bill. Furtado started the night with a few hours of a Beyoncé-exclusive set spanning her entire catalogue. Playing one second of Lemonade’s “Formation” around midnight to signal an upcoming transition provoked audible cheers from the crowd — when the song finally played, a group of friends performed the exact choreography from the music video. A bachata version of “Say My Name” got more than a few hips moving about a half-hour later.
Milan played emcee, bringing voguers like Primo Donyale Luna, who is set to appear in the upcoming Cats: The Jellicle Ball, and DJ Belindzz onstage to battle during “Pure/Honey.” She took the mic down into the crowd for “Irreplaceable,” urging random dancers to sing along as Furtado faded the music in and out and a spotlight followed.
“That’s one of my favorite ballads by Beyoncé,” said Milan. She is currently Doechii’s resident DJ and last year performed alongside the musician to open an L.A. stop on the Renaissance tour: “I do coin myself the Beyoncé of DJs, so I do perform very much like my queen in the DJ-ing aspect.”
Over the course of the night, the vibe landed between concert and club. Motun Ulusa, a guest at the party, said it’s “more intimate” than a concert. She brought her friend Chidera Kingsley along with her to the event: “Obviously, Beyoncé’s not here, so that takes out of it a little, but otherwise, it’s inherently more fun.”(Kingsley agreed that when she went to the Renaissance concert, she found it to be more emotional than the fun here at Club Rodeo.)
By the time the DJs finally started spinning Cowboy Carter, it was around 1:30 a.m. At Milan’s request, as Beyoncé’s first vocals of “Ameriican Requiem” came through the speakers, everyone on the dance floor turned on their phone’s flashlight for a light show. “That was like an out-of-body experience,” she said later. “It felt like a family experience where everyone felt safe, everyone felt loved, everyone was enjoying it, people were hugging.”
It was surprising just how many people knew so many words to an album that had only been out for 24 hours. (“Power of Beyoncé!” Milan quipped later.) And while the dance floor thinned through the progression of some of those first tracks, it was packed again for “Texas Hold ’Em.” Victoria, a partygoer wearing a black dress and short blonde cut, elbowed her way through the crowd to get to her friends. “I wanted to dance to that song,” she said later. She’d heard about Club Rodeo as a follower of Milan and counts herself a Beyoncé fan “insofar as you can be a fan of a billionaire.”
“I don’t know about this album, it’s not my favorite Beyoncé album, but I did have a good time with my friends,” she admitted. When I tell her that some of the best songs of the project are on the second half that she has yet to hear, she nodded: “I have heard that and I want to hear it, but now it’s 2 a.m. I’m ready to go home.”
“With Renaissance, you’re really dancing all night long,” said Desmond Sam, known in nightlife as the party promoter Dez or Die. He hosted the Renaissance cruise last summer as well as Club Rodeo. “But this is different. This is really an experience for you to listen to. And for some of it, if you’re not really into country, you might not be invested in the music,” he added.
As “Just for Fun” played, Erich Nagler (wearing a cowboy hat and a lavender-and-silver Wrangler button-down that he found at a Buffalo Exchange in Texas) and Mitch David sat on couches “taking a breather” right outside the dance floor of 3 Dollar Bill. A themed photo booth was positioned just steps away — the organizers had considered a mechanical bull, but timing and logistics didn’t work out.
By the time the funk-infected “Ya Ya” started up, the dance floor was packed again, though enough revelers had left that there was finally enough room to actually move during a song that demanded it. The crowd clapped and snapped (sometimes off the beat) through it and stayed on through “Desert Eagle” before some began a mock attempt at an Irish river dance to “Riiverdance.” The mood was surprisingly energetic for it to be nearing 2:30 a.m., but the crowd was slowly trickling out. As the last notes of the album closer, “Amen,” played, Milan returned the party to its origins, queuing up Renaissance’s “I’m That Girl.” The dance floor was packed once again. A song later, a pair of friends did the opening choreo to a live version of “Cozy” as they headed to the coat check.
“This one definitely did beyond our expectations,” Furtado said of the crowd. “I would love to do another one, but we will just have to see how people feel about the album in a few weeks. I’m sure Beyoncé will drop some music videos. Well … maybe not.”