Rimarkable’s mother was a classically trained pianist and a music minister in a Pentecostal church in Detroit. Her daughter grew up inside that discipline — the idea that music is sacred, and that you have to earn the right to touch it. Years later, when she founded her own record label, she named it Betty Jean’s Dream, after her.
She started DJing in 1997, working weddings and community events around Detroit (Michigan), which she’ll tell you taught her more about reading a crowd than any classroom. She taught herself production in 2006 rather than wait for an industry that wasn’t ready.
She moved to San Francisco in 2005 and to New York in 2008, and over the following two decades shared stages with George Clinton, Madonna, Erykah Badu, Honey Dijon and Francois K, released on Classic Music Company, Nervous and Waajeed’s Dirt Tech Reck, and joined Defected in 2021, where she hosts the weekly radio show carried on more than 170 FM stations.
She also teaches. She is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute and an instructor at Waajeed’s Underground Music Academy in Detroit, where her course treats DJing as craft, history and business at once — a course that has since traveled to Yale, the Queens Museum, Berlin and Nairobi.
For Locals Insider, Rimarkable wrote about what the church gave her and what the dance floor gave her instead, the difference between a city built on inheritance and one built on reinvention, what has been lost in New York nightlife and what hasn’t, why she thinks not everyone can be a DJ, and where she actually goes out now.
Music Was Something Sacred You Had to Earn the Right to Touch
My mother is a classically trained pianist and was a music minister, so I grew up witnessing that discipline, inside the idea that music is something sacred you have to earn the right to touch. But the church also taught me something else, music is meant to move a room, to carry people somewhere together.
DJing let me keep that communal spirit without the isolation of the practice room. I started in 1997, and by 2006 I was producing too, because I wanted to be inside the sound, not just playing it back. Exposure to a Classical music environment and the rich diversity of Detroit radio gave me the ear.
“The dance floor gave me the reason.”
Detroit Is Inheritance. New York Is Alchemy.
Detroit taught me that music is inheritance. You don’t get to treat it casually here, because everyone before you built something you’re standing on. It taught me patience, and it taught me community first, sound second.
New York taught me alchemy. It taught me how to hold a room full of strangers who don’t know each other yet and turn them into one crowd by the end of the night.
“Detroit gave me my foundation. New York taught me how to move.”
Detroit is rooted in legacy and lineage, you feel the history of techno and soul in the room whether anyone says a word about it. New York is rooted in reinvention, in layering scenes on top of scenes until something new rises out of the mix.
“Detroit asks you to honor where the music came from. New York asks you what you’re going to do with it next.”
Where Home Is
Detroit is home, but so is New York City. My place in Detroit reflects who I am, and there’s a groundedness in Detroit that New York never quite gave me.
New York is where I built my name, where I found so much chosen family, and where many of my life’s sacrifices live. Detroit is where I return to remember who I am underneath it.
What New York Nightlife Lost
The spaces have gotten harder to hold onto, rents rise, venues close, and with them goes some of the trust that used to exist on a dance floor. People used to walk into a club and surrender to it. Now people walk in guarded, and a DJ has to work to earn that surrender back, and sometimes people don’t dance and prefer to socialize.
What gives me hope is watching a new generation still chase that feeling, still show up looking for something real. I’ve also just started building a residency called, Fiesta Forever, which is held in an environment that welcomes, and insists on connection and intimacy. I can see how much people have been needing this.
“The hunger for connection hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just been looking for somewhere safe to land.”
A DJ Is a Caretaker
A DJ is a caretaker before they’re anything else.
“People hand you their night, sometimes their healing, sometimes the only two hours of freedom they’ll get all week.”
That’s not a small thing to be given. Your responsibility is to read what the room actually needs, not just what you feel like playing, and to never forget that the people in front of you are trusting you with something real.
How You Read a Room
The dance floor is not as sacred as it once was. People need to feel safe, and as a DJ, sometimes I have to work harder than usual to develop trust with people on the dance floor.
When I don’t know where to begin with a crowd, I start at the very basic level, I have to find the common bond amongst those in the room. That is most likely a particular song that speaks to a current affair, nostalgia, or is musically infectious, or a succession of these songs. Once folks feel united, they are more likely to let down their guard. At that point, I can understand what they need, or where we need to go musically.
Teaching People the Culture, Not the Buttons
My students come from everywhere, some are already circling the industry and just need language for what they intuitively know, others are discovering for the first time that DJing is a craft with real history and real business behind it. The interest has grown so much, people are hungry to understand the culture, not just the buttons.
What I’m proudest of isn’t any one name. What makes me most proud is witnessing students push past their fears and lean into using the art form as medicine. I’m also proud watching students take the principles we cover things like reading a room, or understanding your own brand, and apply them far beyond the booth, into how they move through their whole lives.
Not Everyone Can Be a DJ
It most definitely requires certain instincts or qualities. Not everyone can be a DJ, some people are made to be selectors, which is a separate but equally important role.
Who Inspires Me Now
I am inspired by my students, by influencing their journeys and their discovery of this gorgeous art form, and by watching them recognize its principles as tools they can apply to their everyday lives.
I’m inspired by young DJs who have researched dance music history and culture and apply that knowledge to how they present their work, seeking to uphold the legacy and integrity of the culture and the music.
Where I Go Out in New York
New York still rewards you if you know where to look for it. I am mostly excited by places that are not oversaturated and beyond the beaten path. I am still very much a child of the underground. I love to go to DIY spaces, or when parties are thrown in unique locations.
This sentiment is why I started producing my event Fiesta Forever, at Third Door Brooklyn, a gorgeous, spectacular place in DUMBO, Brooklyn. This is my return to my practice of creating spaces that don’t exist.
“It’s kind of my thing.”
The Best Dance Floors in Detroit and New York
Six rooms across the two cities Rimarkable calls home — three built in the last decade, three that were here long before any of us. Doors, hours and addresses checked; line-ups change weekly, so look up who is playing before you go.
New York
Nowadays
Queens · House & Techno56-06 Cooper Ave, Glendale NY 11385 · Fri from 22:00 to 06:00, Sat from 14:00, Sun into the evening · RSVP early, the line moves slowly
The closest thing New York has to what Rimarkable says the city lost. Phones are not allowed on the dance floor, the sound system is built for listening rather than volume, and the enormous outdoor space means you can leave the room without leaving the party. Sessions run from afternoon into the following morning.
Good Room
Greenpoint · House & Disco98 Meserole Ave, Brooklyn NY 11222 · Thu–Sat 22:00–04:00, Sun from 18:00 · cash and card at the door
Two rooms, a d&b system and a booking policy that leans on residents rather than headliners — Danny Krivit’s 718 Sessions, DJ Spinna’s Journey, The Carry Nation. If you want to hear the New York house lineage Rimarkable came up inside, this is where it still plays.
Webster Hall
East Village · Since 1886125 E 11th St, New York NY 10003 · ticketed events, hours vary · ID required, passports preferred for non-US visitors
The oldest room on this list by a century. It has been a ballroom, a Prohibition-era speakeasy, Studio 54’s rival, a rock venue as The Ritz and a club again since its 2018 refit. Three rooms, 1,500 capacity in the Grand Ballroom, and a Late Nights programme that still runs to dawn.
Detroit
TV Lounge
Cass Corridor · Techno2548 Grand River Ave, Detroit MI 48201 · Thu 21:00–02:00, Fri 20:00–01:00, Sat 21:00–02:00 · closed Sun and Tue
Detroit’s dependable house and techno room, and the one that fills during Movement. An intimate indoor floor opens onto a large patio with the downtown skyline behind it, which is where most of the night actually happens in summer. Bring a fan; it gets hot.
Paramita Sound
Downtown · Records & Open Decks1517 Broadway St, Detroit MI 48226 · Wed–Thu 17:00–00:00, Fri–Sat to 02:00, Sun 13:00–20:00 · closed Mon and Tue
Record store and wine bar, and the highest-rated room on this list. Vinyl DJs, a well-chosen drinks list, and open-deck nights that give new DJs somewhere to play in public for the first time — which is the practical version of everything Rimarkable teaches.
Saint Andrew’s Hall
Bricktown · Since 1907431 E Congress St, Detroit MI 48226 · ticketed events, hours vary · The Shelter operates separately downstairs
Built as a Scottish social club and a live venue since the 1980s, this is where Detroit’s hip hop and punk scenes grew up. The Shelter, the low-ceilinged basement below, is the room that made its name — small, loud, and still where local acts play before they play upstairs.
Addresses and opening hours verified against each venue’s current listings. Spot Lite, which appears on most Detroit club lists, closed permanently in June 2026 along with UFO Bar, and is not included here. Programmes change weekly at every room on this list — check the listing before you travel.
More from us on music, rooms and the places they happen. Rafi Mercer’s guide to the best listening bars in the world is the same argument from the other side — rooms built so that the music is the main event rather than the decoration.
Our guide to the most beautiful and best-designed bars in the world covers the rooms built around a feeling rather than a floorplan, and the world’s tallest hotels with rooftop bars is the opposite end of the same idea.
For nightlife that rewards knowing where to look, the cocktail bars in Bangkok we’ve tried and loved is the closest thing we have to Rimarkable’s underground. And Richard Stabbert on Provincetown is another artist writing about the American city that made them.
