Madonna has a new song out this summer called “Danceteria,” off her album “Confessions II.” She also opened the World Cup final halftime show in July at New York New Jersey Stadium in East Rutherford, drawing on that album alongside career highlights like “Music” and “Everybody.” Fans who have never heard of the club that inspired the song are searching for answers right now. They’ll find them on Twitch, the livestreaming platform, live from a home studio in Montclair every Thursday night.
Rafe Gomez is the reason. He’s lived in Montclair since 1994, and for the last several years he has spent two hours every Thursday night recreating the exact sound of Danceteria, the legendary Manhattan nightclub where Madonna worked the elevator before anyone knew her name. He calls his show Danceteria Rewind. Sixty thousand people around the world tune in.
“It’s a fun side hustle,” Gomez said, “and it’s bringing a lot of joy to sixty thousand followers around the world.”
To understand why that number keeps climbing, it helps to know what Danceteria actually was.
What was Danceteria, the club Madonna just put back in the spotlight?
Danceteria first opened in 1979 on West 37th Street, an unlicensed after-hours spot that authorities shut down within months. Its legendary second incarnation, at 30 West 21st Street, opened in 1982 and ran until 1986. It filled five floors, and each one felt like a different club. The first floor hosted live bands. The second had DJs. The third was a video lounge, built from hundreds of salvaged televisions all playing experimental footage at once. The fourth floor, called Congo Bill, was a club within the club, so exclusive that Gomez said he never once got past the door. The roof had no railing. That’s where he watched Madonna perform her song “Everybody” for the first time, years before the world knew it.
The staff list reads like a Who’s Who of downtown New York culture in the 1980s. Keith Haring worked there. So did Jean Michel Basquiat, before he was fired as a mural painter. So did the Beastie Boys. So did Madonna, on the elevator, years before her first record came out.
Danceteria didn’t fail. The landlord did. Gomez said the building’s owner quadrupled the rent, and after six years, the club couldn’t cover it. Gomez said the building’s owner quadrupled the rent, and after six years, the club couldn’t cover it.
What made the club matter musically was a style the DJs called open format. No genre was off limits, and no song had to fit the one before it. “It meant anything goes,” Gomez said. “Disco, electro, hip hop, glam, reggae, EDM, early EDM, punk, new wave, afrobeat, seventies funk. Every night you never knew what you were going to hear, but the people who came there came for that.” The crowd’s attitude toward the DJ booth, he said, was simple: “DJs, take us somewhere. We don’t care where we go. We trust you. Let’s do this.”
That trust in the DJ is exactly what pulled one teenager in from New Jersey, again and again.
The night a Montclair teenager bought Madonna a drink
Gomez was 16 when he bought a fake ID in Times Square for five dollars. It got him through Danceteria’s door, where nobody looked twice at teenagers from New Jersey chasing something they couldn’t find at home. He and others like him had a nickname back then, and he wears it like a badge of honor now. “They called us the B and T people, the Bridge and Tunnel people,” he said. “We paid the bills. We didn’t want or expect free anything… This was a haven for folks who couldn’t find opportunities or respite anywhere else in our social lives. This was the destination.”
One night at the bar, he recognized a young woman from an autographed photo he had seen at a record store, before she had a video or a hit. “I walked up and I said, ‘Madonna?’ She said,’yeah’. I said, ‘hey, I loved your track. I love all of the different mixes. Can I buy you a drink’? And she said, ‘yeah, sure’. She had a soda.”
Weeks later, she was performing at the club. Gomez slipped a note under her dressing room door. “I said, ‘Madonna, hi, bought you a drink a couple of weeks ago. If you want to hang out, please let me know.’” He gave her his home number and briefed his mother in advance. “I told my mom, ‘if a girl named Madonna calls, please be cool. Just let it go to the machine or just talk like you’re a friend of mine.’” She never called.
He laughs about it now, but the devotion behind that note never really went away. It just found a new outlet, decades later, on Twitch.
How Rafe Gomez recreates a club that closed almost 40 years ago
Gomez doesn’t scratch records and he barely uses effects. His technique is called beat matching, lining up two songs by tempo and musical key so one flows into the next without a noticeable seam. “I’m finding the songs in the corresponding keys, finding the parts where you can mesh them together, and one song becomes another song in completely different genres,” he said. One set might move from the Archies into Ministry, and most listeners never notice the transition.
He built this audience well before Madonna gave the club a new spotlight, and he’s careful to say so. What’s changed is who’s finding him. “People are joining my chat and they’re saying, ‘hey, just discovered what you’re doing because of Madonna,’” he said. He calls the show “a transportative theater of the mind,” built from original club playlists, songs he heard sneaking in as a teenager and tracks he wishes he had heard back then.
That mix of nostalgia and discovery explains why the timing matters now. A new generation is meeting Danceteria through a pop song instead of a dance floor, and Gomez is betting some of them will want the real thing, in person.
Could Danceteria come back to Montclair?
Gomez has floated the idea before, and Madonna’s song gave him a reason to try again. “I just reached out to our friends at Porta this morning on Bloomfield Avenue and said, ‘fellas, I can bring this back,’” he said. Nothing is booked yet. But the pitch fits everything he has already proven on Twitch: give people a floor to stand on and a DJ willing to take them somewhere they didn’t ask to go.
A pop song sent the world looking for Danceteria. Gomez has been keeping its door open from Montclair the whole time. “Push your furniture out of the way,” he said. “Get something to drink, and vibe with me, people.” Danceteria Rewind streams live on Twitch every Thursday from 8 to 10 p.m. Clear a little floor space, log on, and let him take you somewhere.
Image credit: DanceteriaRewind
