Serato Paradise 2026: Meet Boston Chery, Mike Taylor & YO! MAFIA
There’s a moment every great DJ knows. The energy in the room changes. Something invisible passes between the booth and the floor, and suddenly everyone in the building is breathing together. That happens because someone understood what the room needed and had the courage to give it to them.
For Serato Paradise 2026, we invited three DJs, Boston Chery, Mike Taylor, and YO! MAFIA, to create Apple Music mixes in honor of that feeling on Serato’s Apple Music curator page. The mixes also come as playlists that you can DJ along with.
Each artist has spent their career building their own version of paradise: spaces where people feel completely free to be exactly who they are. Their stories are different. Their sounds are different. But the thread connecting all three of them is the same. A shared commitment to honor the mission that Paradise Garage started: that the dance floor belongs to everyone, and that music is most powerful when it’s completely, unapologetically free.
These artists prove that when you fully embrace who you are, you also give others the power to do the same. Read their stories below and stream their mixes on Apple Music.
The Road to Paradise
From 1977 to 1987, DJ Larry Levan presided over a converted parking garage on King Street in lower Manhattan: a sanctuary for Black, brown and queer people who at the time, found total freedom and safety in a world that gave them anything but. Paradise Garage showed that a different reality was possible. To dance there was to insist on your own humanity.
What came out of that room musically changed DJ culture. Levan and his childhood friend Frankie Knuckles, the godfather of house music, both understood what a dance floor could be. When Knuckles took that vision to Chicago and opened the Warehouse, house music was born. Roland drum machines, the 4/4 pulse, the seamless continuous mix, the set that builds and peaks and releases and the idea of the DJ as the emotional architect of a room. All of it traces back to King Street. Paradise Garage birthed both a culture and an art form.
That spirit lives in every DJ who builds a room where people feel free and every party that asks nothing of you except that you show up as exactly who you are. Boston Chery, Mike Taylor, and YO! MAFIA are three of those people.
Boston Chery
Building Paradise for Others
If Paradise Garage stood for one thing above all else, it was this: everyone deserves a room where they belong completely. That’s the mission Boston Chery has built their entire career around.
The Brooklyn-based DJ, label founder, and child of the Haitian diaspora has spent their career making space where there wasn’t any: for BIPOC DJs who weren’t being booked, for Haitian sounds that weren’t being celebrated, and for queer people of color who showed up to clubs and didn’t see themselves anywhere. Their whole philosophy as a DJ, as a label founder, and as a child of the Haitian diaspora, is rooted in a single belief: paradise is only paradise if everyone gets through the door.
Their sound started out in Hip Hop before moving into queer spaces. Boston’s DJ sets have evolved into something that moves between Haitian Kompa, Caribbean rhythms, Rabòday, and new electronic R&B.
Boston Chery’s Apple Music Mix
Boston’s Apple Music mix opens where their roots are, deep in Haitian Kompa and Caribbean sounds, Aya Nakamura, Naïka, Hey Choppi, before building through Rabòday and contemporary electronic R&B. A journey that moves from the homeland to the dance floor, and makes it feel like the same place. By the end, the room is doing what it was always going to do.
Growing up Haitian in America in the ’90s meant growing up having to defend where you came from. “It wasn’t cool to be Haitian in the 90s. To be Haitian or to put that sound out there is to push against the norm,” Boston says. Their community had to fight for its culture to be respected. That passion never left them, it became the engine of everything they did.
““Haiti is the first independent Black republic in the world and the first nation to free itself from slavery through a successful revolt. I think the world owes everything to Haiti. And that’s what my music is about, giving our sound back, uniting people. Haitian people, we love unity. We like to bring people together to have a good time.”
That love of unity is what eventually led Boston to queer spaces, and to finding that the fit was different. Better. People just being who they are. The music changed too: more Caribbean, more electronic, more designed to make a body move without asking permission. The spaces became the spaces they’d always wanted to be in.
“I started DJing for more queer spaces and it started to feel really good… queer people they love to party, they love to dance, they dance in a different way… no one is in the heteronormative roles, people are just who they are. I think when I started changing to more like electronic, more dancy, more like Caribbean music… the spaces that I booked are very ally-heavy, queer in that sense where everyone is kind of free.”
But when Boston looked at who was being booked in those rooms, who was being platformed, celebrated, seen, they didn’t like what they found. DJ collectives booking racially ambiguous lineups. Dark-skinned artists invisible in the mix. The same door that had once been closed to them was being closed to others. “Am I going to be upset and huff and puff and turn into a blowfish, or am I going to do something different?”
Boston founded The Eighth Path, a label and platform dedicated to platforming BIPOC DJs and producers globally. The name is a painting of Boston Chery: born on the 8th, life path number eight, and the Buddhist Eightfold Path of reaching your highest level of enlightenment. Translated into music: reaching enlightenment through the dance floor and through each other.
The Eighth Path has booked DJs from Australia to Japan, Guadeloupe to Austria: gay, straight, trans, Black, white, Asian, Hispanic. No aesthetic quota. Just talent, community, and the radical idea that everyone deserves a platform.
The philosophy came directly from experience. Early in their career, broke and newly unemployed, Boston met DJ and mentor Natasha Diggs and simply told her they were glad to finally meet a woman DJ. Days later, Natasha texted, “Do you want to DJ a show?” Boston killed it. They got a residency and everything changed for them.
“Because of her, I do the same. I book DJs. I get new DJs and give them residencies. I connect them to any person that I can… Natasha Diggs is the person who did it for me. And so I hope that I can influence people in that same way.”
This is what Boston Chery’s paradise looks like: a room full of Haitian sounds, BIPOC artists, and queer people of color finally seeing themselves on the lineup. The door that was once closed to them, now held wide open for everyone behind them. Joy that multiplies because it’s shared.
“I love to remind people that we’re not alone. There’s somebody out there who has a similar thought, who has the same passion, who wants the same things, who’s already creating that thing. Why not build this new thing?”
Enter Serato Paradise. Stream on Apple Music.
Mike Taylor
Paradise is Reclaiming Joy
Larry Levan understood that a dance floor could be an act of reclamation. That the music Black and queer people built could be given back to them, loudly and without apology. Mike Taylor is making that same argument.
Mike Taylor had something important to say about how we look at joy. “Being dark, mysterious, sometimes sad is almost synonymous with cool. And we associate happiness, especially happiness as it pertains to Black men, with corny.” Mike Taylor shows us what happens when they choose joy anyway.
“Black joy is an act of revolution. Black people are not a monolith. We know the stories, we know the struggles, but I want to start seeing us in our entirety.”
As DJ, Artist and Songwriter, his music is pop, electronic, R&B, and Hip Hop all at once, with a DJ style rooted deep in house. His collaboration with Unlike Pluto, Everything Black, has over 374 million Spotify streams. Billboard compared his vocal performance to Mick Jagger.
Mike Taylor’s Apple Music Mix
Rooted in house, the music that Black and brown queer communities built, Mike Taylor’s Apple Music mix pulls together artists who understand that dance floors have always been political. Billy Porter’s “Broke a Sweat,” Sylvester’s immortal “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” The Blessed Madonna’s “Shades of Love,” Honey Dijon’s “Okay Daddy,” Cakes da Killa on “Bring It Back” all make appearances. Mike Taylor’s own “Body High” is in there too, alongside tracks from Theophilus London, Common, and Lady Alma. A mix that knows its history and dances in it. As Mike puts it: “It’s definitely going to be a vibration.”
“Pride was a riot. It was revolution. It was activism. And we are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
Taylor grew up in Philadelphia: MC-ing, B-boying, building community through grassroots activist events like Palestine fundraisers, cancer drives, voter initiatives. He was good at getting people to show up. “And then I realized,” he says, “it was easier to get people to show up to a party than to vote or show up to community initiatives. So that’s how I naturally got into throwing parties.” And when clubs wouldn’t book him, because he made pop music in a city that wanted him to rap, or because he didn’t fit neatly into any radio format, he built the platform himself.
“When you don’t have something, or you’re trying to get into a door that people are shutting, you want to be there. And then when you get on the other side, you realize there’s nothing happening on that side. So you carve it out. You build it.”
It’s a frustration he knows well, not just as an artist, but as a Black queer man watching the culture his community built get stripped of its roots. “House music originated in Black and brown communities. Years later, we’re not dominant in the spaces we built. We’re not even in the room,” he says.
He navigates the same contradiction as a queer Black man, pushing back on the rigid idea of what queerness is supposed to look like or sound like. A clubber once told him mid-set that his Hip Hop wasn’t gay enough and asked for ABBA instead, while Taylor was playing Doechii. A queer Black artist. He pushes back with the music itself as the argument.
He came out publicly in 2017, after a friend told him: I’ve never met anybody like you, which means you’ve never seen anybody like you either. Be the person the younger version of you needed. “Hit me right in the chest. And then we just showed up and showed out.”
Now he’ll DJ a club and watch a room full of young queer kids, fluid, open, free in ways he couldn’t have imagined when he was their age, and he gets emotional about it. About how far things have come. About everyone who made it possible.
“It’s easy to party. It’s easy to turn up and have fun. But the first place I start is gratitude, for all the folks who put their lives on the line for us to be here and act like a fool.”
This is what Mike Taylor’s paradise looks like: a dance floor where Black queer joy isn’t a political statement. It’s just the truth. Where the music does what it was always supposed to do: give people back to themselves. That’s exactly what Larry Levan understood. And it’s exactly what Mike Taylor is still fighting for.
Enter Serato Paradise. Stream on Apple Music.
YO! MAFIA
Paradise is Where the Square Peg Finally Fits
Paradise Garage was built for the people who didn’t belong anywhere else. For over 25 years, YO! MAFIA has made it her life’s work to make people feel exactly what she feels: that wild, electric rush of a crowd becoming one thing together. It’s the kind of self-confidence that makes you think, “I can’t help but feel that too.”
Her sets are rooted in mashup culture, the art of taking sounds that weren’t supposed to go together and making them feel like they always did. She plays Hip Hop, R&B, 70s funk, disco and rock: “Anything that people can sing, dance and have a great time to, but are going to be surprised by.
YO! MAFIA’s Apple Music Mix
A direct love letter to Paradise Garage. Digging back through her extensive vinyl collection, built during years working in record stores, YO! MAFIA has gone back to OG pressings and the sounds that made King Street sacred. Upbeat, prideful, euphoric. A celebration of the lineage that made every room she plays possible.
“Why not take it back to the pioneers who really elevated everything? It’s a celebration of being gaaay!”
Long before she was YO! MAFIA, she was a girl in Adelaide who didn’t quite fit. Greek family, conservative city, all-girls school, and a kid who loved hip-hop and dressed like the boys. She always knew there was nothing wrong with her, it was just that everyone else had a very firm idea of who she was supposed to be. Her mom put it into words years later: “You were a square peg in a round hole in Adelaide. You needed to leave.”
She left at 17 for Melbourne to train as an actor, found work in a second-hand record store, and started DJing. “Moving from Adelaide to Melbourne, it was such a huge shift because it was the first time I was free,” she explains. “I met a friend at BCA at the drama school, and he took me to Three Faces, one of the big gay clubs in Melbourne, and it was like everything just made sense. And I was just like, ‘Oh my god, I’m home. These are my people. This is my music. This is my vibe.’”
Her sets are shows: visuals, lighting, live MCs, dancers, the works. She tours with Mariah Carey, Pitbull, and Janet Jackson. The most full-circle moment of her career came when she brought Hip-Hop Party Jam, her live production celebrating 50 years of hip-hop, back to Adelaide. The city that couldn’t hold her. Her whole family was in the audience including a dedication to her mom who had passed away the year before. The square peg, finally in a room that fits. “They could see me in all my glory. I always say to them: I get paid to be a d**khead now, because I was always a d**khead and now I get paid to do it.”
And it turns out being a d**khead is contagious. “I love straight men where I see that turn where they’re like, who the f*** is this? Not understanding it. And then that turn where they’ve fallen in love with me. You can’t box me in, you’re not quite sure who I am, and then by the end they’re like oh no, I’m in safe hands. This is awesome,” she says.
For YO! MAFIA, the DJ was never supposed to be the main event, the dance floor is:
“All that energy is coming towards me. Where does it go? It’s got to go back around. Everyone’s got to be fed. It’s just knowing how to create a sense of oneness, like we’re all in this together. Community.”
This is what YO! MAFIA’s slice of paradise looks like: a room where nobody has to be the ‘wrong’ anything anymore. Where the music gives you permission to be exactly who you are, and celebrates you for it. That’s the promise Larry Levan made on King Street. YO! MAFIA has been keeping it ever since.
“Pride is being unabashedly who you are and unapologetically who you are. It’s a rainbow of love.”
Enter Serato Paradise. Stream on Apple Music.
The Lineage of Paradise
Boston Chery, Mike Taylor, and YO! MAFIA all share the belief that the dance floor is one of the few places where people can truly be themselves, and that the DJ’s job is to protect that space at all costs.
To understand why that responsibility matters, we look back to Paradise Garage. A vital sanctuary at a time when the world outside its walls was defined by the AIDS crisis, systemic racism and a government that looked the other way. Black and brown queer people were doubly shut out: from a mainstream culture that had no place for them, and from white-dominated gay spaces that weren’t much more welcoming. On King Street ,they found a freedom that seemed completely out of reach anywhere else.
The artists in this campaign have each built their own version of that sanctuary. They understand that once you’ve felt that kind of paradise, you can’t help but want everyone else to feel it too. By keeping that spirit alive, they continue to build a world where freedom is possible for everyone.
Boston Chery, Mike Taylor and YO! MAFIA’s Apple Music mixes and playlists are available now on Serato’s Apple Music curator page.
Explore Paradise now on Serato’s Apple Music curator page