Zohran Mamdani is poised to become the first former rapper to serve as mayor of New York City, but many others have translated talent on the mic into a job in government
By this point, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is known for many things besides his brief stint as a rapper with the handle Mr. Cardamom: his Democratic Socialist bona fides, his charisma on the campaign trail, and his improbable win in the city’s Democratic primary earlier this year. But there’s no denying that his history on the mic — characterized by winning odes to his Indian heritage and the culture of Uganda, where he was born — showed flashes of the man-of-the-people politician he would become. And while he never dropped a diss track, his takedowns of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on the debate stage were as hard as any bars you’d find in a Kendrick Lamar verse about Drake.
Mamdani isn’t the first person to trade music for public service, either. Perhaps it’s a comfort with performance and audiences that leads rappers and rockers to pursue this career change, not always with great success. American Idol contestant Clay Aiken ran for Congress twice in North Carolina, winning the Democratic primary in 2014 before losing in the general election. Country legend Kinky Friedman ran for governor of Texas, 98 Degrees singer Justin Jeffre entered a mayoral race in Cincinatti, and in 2010 Wyclef Jean made a quixotic bid to be elected president of Haiti — but none of these efforts panned out. (Jean didn’t even meet Haiti’s constitutional requirements to appear on the ballot.)
Musicians with more modest political ambitions seem more likely to find their niche. Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, for example, was an elected Democratic State Committeeman and served as chair of the Wahkiakum County Democrats in Washington state from 2006 to 2009. Longtime E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg kept things even more local as a member of the beach planning and zoning board for Delray, Florida. Still, it’s not entirely out of the question for such stars to claim more visible jobs in government. Just ask anybody on this list.
Jon Fishman
Image Credit: Paul R. Giunta/Getty Images A co-founder of the jam band Phish (named after him, as the story usually goes), drummer Jon Fishman enjoyed a brief stint in local politics. Between endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and performing at his campaign events, he advocated — along with Nirvana’s Novoselic — for ranked-choice voting in statewide elections in Maine, which became the first state in the nation to adopt the system in 2018. In 2017, he won a seat on the select board of Lincolnville, Maine, the tiny coastal town that had been his home for a decade. “Bernie was saying, ‘Look at all of…
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