New York Flow: Zohran Mamdani's Journey From Underground Rap To City Hall
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In one of the most striking political upsets in recent memory, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City on November 4, 2025, securing just over 50 percent of the vote and defeating Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa. His win made him the city’s first Muslim mayor, its first of South Asian descent, and the youngest in more than a century.
But what makes his story compelling is less the politics and more the prelude: his years as a multilingual, culture-inflected rapper performing under names like Young Cardamom and Mr. Cardamom. That musical chapter offers a sharp lens through which to understand his sense of identity, organising, and the city he now leads.
New York, the birthplace of hip-hop, has long been a city where art and politics converge. In that lineage, Mamdani’s rap past feels less like an anomaly and more like inheritance. His career began in the mid-2010s alongside his friend Hussein Abdul Bar, releasing tracks that blended humor, language, and diasporic memory. Their song “Kanda (Chap Chap)” played on East African slang and South Asian food references; their 2016 EP Sidda Mukyaalo, featuring six songs in six languages - translated to “no going back to the village” in Luganda.
Mamdani drew influence from the absurdist humour of groups like Das Racist, balancing wordplay with commentary on migration and class. He described himself as a “C-list rapper,” which afforded him freedom — to experiment, to fuse languages, to discover his voice. In one 2019 video, “Nani,” actress and food authority Madhur Jaffrey appeared as his grandmother in a street-food cart.
The shift from Mr. Cardamom to Mayor Mamdani looks abrupt only on paper. His music was always about identity, translation, and belonging—themes that now define his politics. Hip-hop taught him to speak across difference, to build coalitions out of shared tempo rather than shared background. That’s a skill New York has always rewarded.
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