Let’s start by acknowledging that caring too much about a political candidate’s musical tastes is how you wind up with something like the slightly eye-rolling spectacle of post-White House Barack Obama, lobbing playlists at the country every few months like he was campaigning for the position of Nation’s Official Wedding DJ. But if we are going to grill, say, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani about music, can we please go a little deeper than Frank Sinatra and Jay-Z?
We speak in this case of a video posted this week by Track Star, showing host Jack Coyne subjecting Mamdani to his massively popular musical quiz show. Coyne has talked in interviews about tailoring his picks—which respondents have to name after hearing just a snippet of the song—to his guests when he has a celebrity interview, but, like, c’mon: He opens with “Empire State Of Mind,” rolls into The Strokes, and then plays one of Mamdani’s own past rap songs for him. Yes, he eventually gets slightly deeper cuts, including Jadakiss and Mobb Deep, but in the middle there we get Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” and Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” It’s only when Coyne busts out Billy Joel’s “New York State Of Mind” that Mamdani is stumped. (Zohran Mamdani: Not a Turnstiles guy.)
We get that Coyne was going for a theme here, but we still feel like you could go a lot harder; nobody wins when we softball candidates on the issues that actually matter, like whether “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” which clearly takes place in New York, can be considered a “New York” song. (Look, we’re not the ones who run the insanely successful music quiz show.)
The music-minded video happened to come out on what’s been a weirdly TV-focused day for the New York campaigns: Mamdani rolled out a new ad during Law & Order tonight that riffed on that show’s legendary iconography, down to having a copyright-filed-off version of Mike Post’s original theme song powering it. His opponent Andrew Cuomo, meanwhile, posted a completely bizarre, clearly shit-out-by-AI-in-20-minutes parody of Schoolhouse Rock that encouraged many people on the internet to ask why Cuomo imagines the Bill from “I’m Just A Bill” to wear red lipstick and be visibly pregnant like half the time. In that context, we guess lobbing softballs at Mamdani about whether Julian Casablancas is a nice guy—he is, apparently!—isn’t the worst thing in the world.
