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Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
5 Songs That Define Zohran Mamdani's Campaign for New York Mayor
Image by Chris Panicker. Photo by Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Speaks for itself. Never has a song been made specifically about June 24 until this. Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Best Music of 2025 So Far
All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by Pitchfork editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission. Graphic by Chris Panicker Pitchfork's editors are already sorting, compiling, and straining to remember all the music that's been released this year. So we're spotlighting some of 2025's most outstanding records to date by rounding up albums that have earned high scores and Best New Music designations with a quick list of RIYLs (that's Recommended If You Like) and links to our coverage. Unlike our year-end lists, this one is organized in reverse chronological order. To help you keep track of the year's best music, we'll be updating it periodically throughout the remainder of 2025. (All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.) RIYL: Fragrantica reviews; phenomenology; dream logic; the relationship between scent and memory; live music as a liminal space; subtle club beats; modern dance; the sounds of the Oslo subway Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Actually watching, not waiting out, the movie credits; Lia Kohl; loop pedals; Mississippi humidity; buying old family photos at a dilapidated vintage shop; The Sacrificial Code; taking the window seat on multi-hour train trips Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Scrapbooks; collage; free spirits; false starts; first-thought-best-thought; house shows; unplugging; touching grass; smoking grass; growing grass; that one tape that's been on the dashboard of your car for like five years, since that road trip you took with your best friend, and still sounds great no matter how garbled it gets Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Timelapse videos of nature; drum 'n' bass to chill out to; Floating Points symphonies; Objekt; making a complex, inventive beverage to pair with a piece of buttered toast Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Geopolitics; anticolonialism; peace studies; survivor's tales; kuduro; Burial; rave stabs; reverb; battered patinas; smoke; shrapnel; slivers of light; silver linings Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Grouper; the landscape of coastal Ireland; Gothic novels; Cocteau Twins; going to the beach when it's raining; dream pop; uilleann pipes; frost on the windows Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Tinned salmon; vintage folding lawn chairs; Bruce Hornsby records; grinning from ear to ear; love's clarion trumpeters; more fine product collaborations Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Sea shanties; foghorns; Ravedeath, 1972; Ágætis byrjun; secular acts of worship; always carrying Narcan; 'the great blue yonder'; prior accordion experience not required Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Trance without the kick drum; chance music; jazz-not-jazz; engineering; oops all intros; '90s ambient; deconstructed techno; stereofields; Skee Mask Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Dappled sunlight; reducing, reusing, and recycling; lifelong friendship; minimalist folk; cosmic ambient; getting really stoned and going to the aquarium; pondering mortality Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Every genre you've ever heard; Drain Gang when they have joie de vivre; Pokémon fanfic; Julio Torres; dying on arcade games; hyperpop wunderkinds; sensory obliteration tanks; sci-fi EDM; emo rap with plausible deniability; playing Skrillex and the Chainsmokers in separate tabs and thinking it's one song that kind of slays Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Backpacking across India; private afters at Ibizan villas; warped cassette tapes; warm fuzzies; schlager; Afro-house; a blurrier Blur; a kindlier Keinemusik; breathing exercises; golden sunsets Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Self-deprecating humor; mixtapes; vocal fry; quick cuts; hyperpop; hyperactive pop; video-game soundtracks; 'Will It Blend?' videos; monster-truck announcers; monster bass; deadly beats; resurrection Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Trips to the dentist; unrelenting Britishisms; laser pistols; SOPHIE's 'Faceshopping'; Federici's Caliban and the Witch; eye of newt; tongue of frog; how changing your gender changes reality Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Chilled red; midlife crisis literature; bologna sandwiches; Bowie/Eno; barbershop quartet in Purgatory; auditioning younger actors for your biopic Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Meditative piano; native plants in bloom; Music for Airports; sitting on a bench at a James Turrell exhibit; sunlight through stained glass; Ryuichi Sakamoto; seeing how long you can hold a note Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Sensory deprivation tanks; hushed, cozy beats; slinking around the club by yourself; pre-cringe James Blake; softboy vocals Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Exposure therapy; dyeing your hair blonde as a trauma response; the phrases 'featuring Aldous Harding' and 'produced by Blake Mills'; agoraphobia; ragged guitar solos; tasteful flutes; sneaky disillusion; quiet wisdom Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Ceremonial music in the club; Boredoms; rough edges; raw Chicago footwork; arrhythmia; keytars; cowboy hats; spamming samples in DJ sets; 'if you ain't red-lining, you ain't headlining'; collapsing the distant past and present Listen/Buy: Bandcamp RIYL: Psychotic art rock; drummers; New York noise rock; Battles; Hella; rototoms; bands so tight they sound electronic Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Power pop done right; yung Guided by Voices; Royal Headache; big lo-fi hooks; Chicago rock; DIY spaces; a pill that makes you stay young forever Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Having a formative Andy Warhol phase as a teenager; maximalism; analog synths; the concept of lipsyncing for your life; this photo of David Bowie and Trent Reznor hanging out; a touch of funk; campy horror movies; inventing your own nachos Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Model/Actriz; Modest Mouse; Deafheaven; 'weightlifting music' generally; the tortured artist; the intentionally ugly; getting it off your chest Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Alan Watts; jiu-jitsu; meditation retreats; Total Refreshment Centre; woolly sweaters; baby animals; joining a The Artist's Way book club Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Anti-capitalism; open-source software; culture-jamming; UbuWeb; the Electronic Frontier Foundation; 2000s electroclash; gabber remixes; self-aware bangers that aren't afraid to break a sweat Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Free diving; folktronica; music boxes; Burt Bacharach; full moons; glowing tides; weightlessness; the softest blanket ever Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Beach Boys; beach buoys; stacked harmonies; distilled essences; family reunions; midlife crises; new beginnings; simple pleasures; the golden light of Lisbon Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Dean Blunt; King Krule; SSENSE; NTS; natural wines; autumn leaves; the after-afters Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Friday night at the jazz club; Sunday mornings at home; celestial harps; acoustic soul; Betty Carter; Joni Mitchell; the scent of jasmine Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Going on a date to the Met Cloisters; Caroline Polachek; Bladee; Baroque polyphony; e-girl aesthetics; Y2K nostalgia; making memes about Enya but also genuinely loving Enya Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Introspection; introversion; intricate wordplay; extended rhyme schemes; hypnagogic drift; hip-hop history; psychedelic sample flips; hard-won wisdom Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: PJ Harvey; Julianna Barwick; David Lynch; attic rooms; taxidermy; RCA cables; 'Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned' Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Distorted 808s; Carti worship; bass-boosted edits; shitposting as a love language; 'ok is the hardest'; dunking on leakers Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Rage and resilience; an unexpected Kenny Segal collaboration; bluesy Yves Tumor; a dreamy ode to gay bars; righteous provocations; corroded textures Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Hallucinogenic dance music; soukous guitar; Ghanaian highlife; Latin cumbia; synth horns; bit-crushed drums; fireworks finales; dream sequences Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Ray of Light; Vespertine; 'I Feel Love'; strobe lights; Simonson technique; fetish couture; kissing a stranger at the club Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Re-reading Braiding Sweetgrass; somatic therapy; social media detoxes; Joni Mitchell deep cuts; long life-affirming conversations with friends; a little jazz, a little banjo; quilting as a metaphor Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Hot coffee on hot afternoons; pouring rum in coffee; street music; salsa; dembow; collapsing the past and the present sounds of Puerto Rico; songs about sexy ladies on the beach; songs that will make you call your mom Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal RIYL: Classic rock; soft rock; close-harmonized vocals; theatrical vibrato; exploratory falsetto; unabashed melodrama; states of innocence; songs about mononymic women; theological subtexts; the warble of warped vinyl; the vicissitudes of migrating geese Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
TikTok Brainrot Is Normalizing Alt-Right Ideologies
Illustration by Chris Panicker The TikTok begins with a video of YouTube music reviewer Anthony Fantano dissing underground artist Nettspend's debut album, BAD ASS F*CKING KID, saying he's 'not really a super skilled rapper.' There's a pause with a fabricated Wikipedia entry saying Fantano is of Jewish descent (the actual page says 'Sicilian descent'), and then a barrage of flashy Nettspend clips zip across the screen, woven into bursts of military gliders and colossal temples. A psychotic hardstyle remix of Zedd's 'Clarity' shudders in the background. '271k monthly listeners,' the creator writes in the description, a reference to a Nazi dogwhistle about Holocaust deaths. This is one of a slew of recent clips that cast Nettspend as the blonde-haired, blue-eyed prince of Vril and Agartha, a fictional life-force and kingdom, respectively. 'Nettspend is the white savior of the underground,' says one comment with over 1,200 likes. 'Nettspend will ring through the trumpets as god descends to earth from heaven,' proclaims another. Clips referencing Vril and Agartha have been a fixture of online communities for years. But this new wave of edits is borderline absurd, to the point where they're like experimental collages. There are clips of giant temples and flying saucers mixed into glowing montages of the white underground rapper Joeyy with comments calling him the 'chancellor of Agartha.' Guys are exposing babies to Vril edits. Videos brim with occult iconography and calls for a new Vril society while using fakemink, Charli xcx, Sematary, and bitcrushed trance songs as the soundtrack. For the uninitiated, these mythical concepts, Vril and Agartha, both originate in books. Agartha, which is big in the occultist canon, refers to the belief in a legendary society within the Earth's core. It was devised in the late 1800s by the French writer Louis Jacolliot, and later built on by Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, who claimed that he visited this secret land of a million inhabitants through astral projection. Shards of the idea have littered the cultural landscape, like in Call of Duty and Miles Davis' 1975 live album Agharta. Vril comes from the British author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who's responsible for a number of famous phrases like 'a dark and stormy night.' Less known but just as influential is his 1871 novel Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, which describes a superhuman race of Vril-ya who live in a utopia powered by a special 'all-permeating' fluid. Decades later, Nazis latched onto the idea, with some even spending time hunting for Vril. Online, these ideas have become diluted and deformed, dumbed-down to images of tradwife blondes and futuristic triangle structures. People often conflate Agartha with Hyperborea, a land of eternal sunshine in Greek mythology that's been a recurring obsession for the alt-right. Other video motifs include UFOs, idyllic green pastures, and vigorous exhortations to drink only the purest, rawest milk. In the most despicable clips, Agartha and Vril have become stand-ins for bigotry. People use #vril on clips celebrating Elon Musk's Sieg Heil stunt, spewing anti-immigrant rhetoric and racist dogwhistles. Some of the content echoes the ongoing Save Europe campaign: xenophobes begging to make Europe fully white, rewiring classic Eurodance songs like Gigi D'Agostino's 'L'Amour Toujours' into singalong hate-anthems. That trend already spiraled into real-world hostility in 2024; while the song played at a bar in Germany, a crowd reportedly yelled slurs at a Black woman and punched her in the face, with one man allegedly Nazi-saluting. What makes this wave of videos particularly bizarre is its overlap with brainrot memes. As Vril posts have exploded in recent weeks—over 700,000 TikTok videos use the hashtag—there's been a surge of obvious parodies, like Jack Black edits and one where a cat gazes mesmerized as it contemplates the holy effulgence of Vril. The basic idea of people treating Nettspend—teen rapper drawling about downing lean—as an Aryan prince is ridiculous to anyone whose brain isn't totally zapped. But there are clearly people who believe he's some kind of prophet, declaring their fealty to the Chosen One. It's easy to see why impressionable kids are seduced by these videos, which resemble roided-up campaign ads. A blitz of rapidfire clips and throttling hardstyle, they radiate a desire to teleport to some fictional land of Chad males and waifish e-girls. Ron DeSantis already used a frantic mashup style like this for an infamous attack ad, and it's not hard to imagine the zoomers running the GOP socials dropping Vril and Agartha memes. (FPÖ Tirol, a right-wing populist party in Austria, just became the first political party to make a Vril edit, racking up hundreds of thousands of views on a TikTok posted Monday.) QAnon was for senescent boomers; fashwave and Embrace Masculinity clips are millennial-coded. Now the aspiring fascists are into Vril, which they basically use like the concept of aura but with an added layer of white supremacy. The Nettspend fandom is so laced with irony to begin with, it makes sense that he'd turn into a figurehead for this 'scene,' if you can call it that. As with other inane crazes like gooning, a sexual fetish that became a TikTok meme, Agartha, Vril, and Hyperborea have become buzzwords in the open-source patchwork of puerility that dominates the internet today. They're no longer the preserve of occult researchers and xenophobes. Now they're being adopted into the unhinged babble of SlimeTok, the underground rap subculture full of video editors pushing language to the brink—a glorious wasteland of 'ts pmo' and Gurt lore and Druski clips (if you don't know what any of those are, congratulations!). Essentially, the same people whose For You page feeds them conventional underground rap clips are now getting Aryan Nettspend edits and commenting stuff like 'pshh OsamaSon better.' The result is a sinkhole of winky irony and simmering hatred, some genuinely funny gibberish tangled with mask-off racism. The algorithm collapses context into a post-post-ironic mishmash. In one scroll of TikTok's fried conspiracy-rap underworld you'll find UncleAgartha, a guy who looks like store-brand Thor, making 'ASMR You're a Femboy in Agartha' roleplays and filming videos pretending to be drinking Monster inside the hollow Earth. In the next, everyone in the comments will be spamming anti-immigrant screeds and dogwhistles while the audio is a brain-bulldozing hardstyle remix of a Bladee song. One clip is cherry-picked crime stats; the next offers a 'testerone-maxxed' Chicken Jockey phonk edit. Some Vril and Agartha heads are despairing about the way their precious dogwhistles have leaked beyond the realm of looksmaxxing forums and 4chan to hit critical mass. It's at the point where students playing online quiz games are naming their accounts after the myths (as shown in a popular TikTok using an audio that mashes King Von with Scott Brown and calls it an 'Aryan remix.') 'bro we are becoming the new brainrot,' one commenter cries in distress. 'fascism itself is peak for frying your dopamine receptors,' another chirps back. To a certain extent, this entire video craze feels like a psy-op—a distraction from the actual horrendous things going on in the world. Unlike Save Europe, which has hundreds of TikTok edits and YouTube mixes devoted to purifying countries and turning them into ethnostates, the Agartha-Vril zone has no coherent idea or apparatus of attack yet. It's hopelessly subsumed by nonsense; as one commenter puts it on a harebrained video that montages a Swastika-shaped video game boat with irrelevant clips from Minecraft and Angry Birds: 'the Vril has been lost in translation.' But there's a real risk in letting harmful ideologies disguise themselves as brainrot, because it makes them harder to moderate and easier to normalize. A cynic could argue that brainrot is destroying the fabric of society, infesting middle school classrooms with verbal excrement and making kids more susceptible to alt-right pipelines. And they're not totally wrong: Stupidity begets stupidity, it primes you to think less critically. One viewer might realize the irony and laugh at a satirical edit; another might fall down the rabbit hole for good. Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
