For a late night drink (open till 4am most nights), head to the Black Dog Ballroom (Corner Tib Street/Church Street, 0161-839 0664, blackdogballroom.co.uk), below Affleck's Palace in the Northern Quarter.
With its nods to New Orleans, its imagery invoking the realities of police brutality, its celebration of black gay ballroom culture and the Black Panthers, Beyoncé's latest single is perhaps the most straightforward expression of her blackness.
Big, black, blinding ballrooms with bus-seat carpet and a cloud of Rothmans cigarette smoke lingering just underneath the strip lights on the ceiling.
THE BLACK PARTY, Roseland Ballroom, 239 West 52nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 307-7171.
This borrowing of drag terms is technically nothing new – Madonna's Vogue borrowed heavily from the cult hit Paris is Burning, which focused on the unique style of drag dancing that blossomed from black and Latino ballroom culture in Harlem – but RuPaul is bringing it to a new generation.
"Shade" or "throwing shade" is a term that originated in the queer black and Latino ballroom scene, as documented in 1989's "Paris is Burning".
It is decades since I have seen any décor for a 19th-century ballet more beautiful than the black-pillared Spanish ballroom for the final act here.
* BLACK EYED PEAS, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey Street, near the Bowery, Lower East Side, (212) 533-2121.
"Too many of our kids are dropping out of schools," Mr. Obama told a mostly black audience in the ballroom of the Sheraton New York Hotel in Manhattan.
Weekly events include a lobby DJ on Mondays and donation-based community yoga on Sundays in the high-ceilinged, black and red-floored ballroom.
