<\/p>\n
New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was once a rapper<\/a> named Mr. Cardamom \u2014 and his rap career is still<\/em> past tense. On Oct. 4, attorney Jim Walden, who recently backed out of his own independent mayoral campaign weeks before the November election, made an X post<\/a> featuring an Apple Music screenshot of a song called \u201cBENTON BUILD.\u201d It\u2019s credited to a rapper named qrinceton, with a feature listed from Mr. Cardamom. But there\u2019s no trace of Mamdani on the silky song, which was released on July 11, about two weeks after he won<\/a> the city\u2019s Democratic mayoral primary in an upset<\/a> that made headlines around the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThat absolutely is not Zohran,\u201d a Mamdani representative tells Rolling Stone<\/em>. So what happened here?<\/p>\n More from Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n Walden qualified his X post by noting that \u201cunless an impostor pulled a prank, Zohran briefly returned to his rap career.\u201d It appears that the first part of that sentence was right \u2014\u00a0Mr. Cardamom\u2019s presence on the song is a joke of some kind. The first verse features a rapid-fire, barely intelligible verse from the otherwise unknown qrinceton himself. And the second verse takes a smoother approach, which doesn\u2019t resemble Mamdani\u2019s vocal tone, heard in actual Mr. Cardamom songs such as \u201cNani\u201d and \u201cKanda (Chap Chap)\u201d (released in 2017 and 2015, respectively, when he was a foreclosure prevention counselor moonlighting as a rapper). Lines from the second verse, such as \u201cbanana peel triggers make it feel like World War III,\u201d are probably the last thing any credible mayoral candidate would be expressing to the world.<\/p>\n It appears most likely that qrinceton, an upstart artist whom Rolling Stone <\/em>was unable to reach for comment, utilized the same DSP featured artist hack<\/a> that had illegitimate versions of classic mixtapes on streaming services earlier this summer. As industry sources told us then<\/a>, it\u2019s \u201ctoo easy\u201d for artists to manipulate digital music providers by adding any name they want to the \u201cprimary artist\u201d section of their music upload. Sometimes, like with \u201cBENTON BUILD,\u201d the erroneous upload makes it all the way to DSPs, and it\u2019s up to the wronged artist to issue a takedown, which could take weeks. (Similar issues have led to AI-generated fake music<\/a> showing up on Spotify credited to long-defunct acts.)<\/p>\n Qrinceton has 313 monthly Spotify listeners, and the YouTube clip of \u201cBENTON BUILD\u201d has just 11 views. It wouldn\u2019t be surprising if he pulled the false-feature move for the exact attention he\u2019s getting right now. As of now, \u201cBENTON BUILD\u201d remains on all DSPs \u2014 and Mamdani is prepping for the final stretch of his momentous campaign to run New York City.<\/p>\n Best of Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for RollingStone’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was once a rapper named Mr. Cardamom \u2014 and his rap career is still past tense. On Oct. 4, attorney Jim Walden, who recently backed out of his own independent mayoral campaign weeks before the November election, made an X post featuring an Apple Music screenshot of a song […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2075154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[345917,389511,389513,389512,389514,314737,369632],"class_list":["post-2075153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-apple-music","tag-cardamom","tag-democratic-mayoral-primary","tag-jim-walden","tag-mayoral-candidate","tag-rolling-stone","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/No-Zohran-Mamdani-Did-Not-Drop-a-New-Rap-Verse.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2075153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2075155,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075153\/revisions\/2075155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2075154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2075153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2075153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2075153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}