Zohran K. Mamdani presents like a true man of the people. The 33-year-old Queens assemblyman frequently travels by Citi Bike, is unfailingly gregarious in encounters with his constituents, and, in March, showed up to the State Capitol to demand the release of Columbia graduate activist Mahmoud Khalil—still detained for his role in organizing the school’s protests against the war in Gaza. But Mamdani wants to be the man of the people, and his eye is set on the highest office in the five boroughs: mayor of New York.
When Mamdani announced his run last October, he (and, frankly, anyone else without the last name Cuomo) was considered a dark horse in the race. But in just five months, his grassroots, social media–driven campaign—inspired by fellow young, internet-savvy progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Florida representative Maxwell Frost, and City Council member Chi Ossé—and affordability–driven messaging made him the first candidate to max out on public fundraising, with more individual donors than all of his primary competition combined. According to a recent Intelligencer profile, around 22,000 volunteers and counting have canvassed on behalf of Zohran for NYC, as Mamdani challenges to win the Democratic nomination.
“There’s a lot of your life that you cannot live in the same way in the midst of a campaign of this scale,” Mamdani told me recently over the phone from Albany. “But music is one of the things that you can hold on to, because you can listen to it in the midst of doing something else.”
Mamdani has never found himself too far from the world of music. He volunteered for Ali Najmi’s campaign for City Council, in 2015, after learning about the candidate from former Das Racist rapper Heems, and even pursued his own short-lived hip-hop career under the name Mr. Cardamom. Earlier this spring, Mamdani turned an MJ Lenderman concert at Brooklyn Steel into an impromptu rally, speaking about his policies and concerns for the city for several minutes.
Summarizing his platform to me, Mamdani said “It’s about the fact that New Yorkers can’t afford to live in the city they call home.” To that end, he recently pledged to increase governmental assistance to one-to-one small business programs by $20 million and slash fines for those same businesses in half, to “ensure that the places that make this city feel like home, the places that make our city so special, are the ones that continue to thrive here.” Mamdani and I spoke about living on a “permanent digital tape delay,” making Spotify Blend playlists with his wife, and the New York hip-hop classic that he believes is the perfect anthem for Primary Day, Tuesday, June 24.
BlaketheMan1000: “Citibike”
A lot of the way I get around the city while I’m running for mayor is via Citi Bike, and this is a song that has been stuck on loop in my head for many, many months of the campaign. I was once actually singing along to it a little bit too loudly as I ran into a potential constituent. A major initiative we’ve been leading since the beginning of this campaign is making the slowest buses in the country fast and free, and getting around quickly is also at the core of that song, when Blake speaks about trading in the blue for the white bike.
I think many of us Citi Bikers can attest that when you have to actually get somewhere fast, there’s no better way. Part of what connects Citi Biking with that same vision around buses and public transit in general is that if we want New Yorkers to use public transit, then we should incentivize it and ensure that it’s not actually more expensive depending on what mode you use. And, right now, it can be prohibitively expensive to use a Citi Bike to get somewhere, which I’ve found myself a number of times, where you can see a cost going past $10 because you missed a train and the only way to get there as quickly as possible is by bike—yet it was costing you more than three times the amount.
Keith Juluka: “Kind Regards” [ft. Laila]
So I live on a permanent digital tape delay, which is how I describe watching Instagram Reels instead of TikTok, and that’s how I found this song. Unlike most people who hear a song in that matter, I then went and added it to my playlist and now know many of the words.
It’s a song where one of the lines is “I know there’s an email that hopes to find me well/Well, I hope it don’t find me.” And it is a song that I identify with, especially as this race intensifies: just how many emails and text messages I’m currently behind on, dreaming every night as I go to bed of “inbox zero” and waking up to “inbox a thousand.” I try to go through as close as I can to 50-100 text messages each day, but the thing about sending one is you might get another one back.
Lil Wayne: “Right Above It” [ft. Drake]
A classic. It has some hints of Indian representation with the shoutouts to Slumdog Millionaire, and it’s indicative of what you have to do with the campaign—just keep your head above water.
I think Kendrick absolutely destroyed him. It’s a real testament to message discipline over many songs, and it’s an inspiration for me as a politician to always stay on my message. I’m trying to do what Kendrick did in the course of that beef, but, specifically, around affordability. At every juncture, he would bring it back to his central points, and I think that’s the key, is that you keep coming back to what your core message is. For me, it’s about the fact that New Yorkers can’t afford to live in the city they call home.
Y.A.S.: “Get It Right”
This song brings me back to the little Arabic I’ve been able to retain, because the opening is just her counting from one to 10. It reminds me of how much work I have to do to get back to some kind of conversational fluency. I studied Arabic in college and was at one point conversational, but that has, sadly, left me in the years since.
I think there’s a lot of your life that you cannot live in the same way in the midst of a campaign of this scale, but music is one of the things you can hold on to because you can listen to it in the midst of doing something else—walking to the train, getting on the bus. Even in the morning, just as I’m getting ready, my wife and I will listen to a number of Indian songs that are sometimes classical, sometimes a little more lo-fi, and then as I get out of the house, it tends to go into a lot of rap and hip-hop and also a heavy dose of nostalgia for the 2010s.
I remember when we first met, my wife and I did one of those blended Spotify playlists, and it was really embarrassing, because all of her songs were these lovely beautifully curated songs, even though it was algorithmically generated. It just felt very thoughtful and intentional, and all of mine were, like, “Love in this Club,” by Usher featuring Young Jeezy.
Jadakiss: “We Gonna Make It” [ft. Styles P]
Speaks for itself. Never has a song been made specifically about June 24 until this.
