In his inauguration speech, Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to be a mayor for all New Yorkers.

He began delivering on that promise in the ceremony itself, which contained references and in-jokes for New Yorkers of nearly every class, race, generation and creed.

Mamdani nodded to the Knicks’ star guard Jalen Brunson. He name-checked the immigrant cuisines of South Asia, Jamaica, Brazil, and of Ashkenazi and Litvak Jews (biryani, beef patties, picanha, and pastrami on rye). He even tipped a hat to the city’s local historians and journalists when he joked that he would serve “as either your 111th or 112th mayor.”

Himanshu Suri, a creative polymath better known as “Heems” (whom Mamdani once called his favorite rapper), said the mayor’s speech shared the rhythms of rap.

“Rap is super reference-laden, and that’s what I heard there, across New York experiences and New York identities,” Suri, who attended the inauguration, said in a phone interview. “Racially, ethnically, but also beyond census checkboxes, just the diversity of life experiences.”

Mamdani did not explain to the unfamiliar his mention of gurdwaras or mandirs, nor did he translate the snippet of Urdu he quoted, and or explicate his deadpan nod to a viral rap battle.

But a number of the musical and cultural ideas from the inauguration ceremony deserve a bit of explaining. Here are some highlights.

“I’m outside”

In 2021, rapper Jadakiss and his legendary 1990s group The Lox, from Yonkers, went up against Harlem icons The Diplomats at Verzuz, a forum famous for rap battles.

After demolishing the competition nearly singlehandedly, a hyped-up Jada snatched the mic to denounce fake rappers.

“New York, the real New York, I’m outside,” he said. “I don’t live in Miami. I don’t live in Colorado. Come to my block and see me,” he continued, before throwing his cap and screaming “I’m outsiiiide!”

The line became a viral catchphrase and cultural shorthand for having street cred. As Kiss later said on a talk show, “I was out of my mind that day. I wasn’t on anything, but the zone I was in was Adderall war mode.”

Near the close of his speech, Mamdani recited the policy promises he would fulfill, adding that his mayoralty would “in the words of Jason Terrance Phillips, better known as Jadakiss, or J to the mwah, be ‘outside’ — because this is a government of New York, by New York, and for New York.”

“That’s just some real New York rap s—, New York hood s—,” Suri said.

The socialist roots of “Over the Rainbow”

The inauguration ceremony’s first musical performance came from actor Mandy Patinkin, who sang “Over the Rainbow” alongside Staten Island’s P.S. 22 children’s chorus.

Patinkin has a long history with the song, which he’s known to sing in Yiddish. That’s appropriate, given that its composer was a Yiddish-speaking Russian Orthodox Jew who grew up on the Lower East Side and counted high school classmate Ira Gershwin among his lifelong friends.

Edgar “Yipsel” Harburg — who shared his chosen nickname with the Young People’s Socialist League — was a committed social democrat whose songs critiqued economic inequality. He penned the Depression-era anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and wrote every song in “The Wizard of Oz.” He was also blacklisted for refusing to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

“Over the Rainbow” won Harburg an Oscar. Given his background, it’s not hard to read Mamdani’s choice to include the song in the inauguration as a symbol of his dedication to combating class struggle. In “Oz,” Dorothy sings it on a tornado-stricken dust bowl farm, 10 years into the Great Depression.

The Pakistani auntie Mamdani met in Queens

Near the end of his speech, Mamdani recounted a story from his recent public listening marathon at the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria, where he spent 12 hours meeting with New Yorkers for three minutes each.

A woman named Samina, whom Mamdani referred to as a “Pakistani auntie,” told him that his campaign had created new possibilities in politics. The mayor quoted her briefly in Urdu, without translating, and moved on.

But the full three-minute exchange between the two is worth watching. Samina reads the mayor a prepared statement and apologizes for her English, which appears to be perfectly fluent. She gasps when Mamdani switches to Urdu, and they continue the conversation in her native tongue. Samina tells the mayor he has put beauty and softness into people’s hearts and minds — the Urdu word “dil” can mean both, and in poetry often denotes a person’s deeper emotional and spiritual core.

She tells the mayor that this is a gift he’s received from God, and as she leaves , Mamdani pauses his listening session to wipe away tears and recompose himself. South Asians around the globe are already pointing to both the original video and his quote of it as deeply meaningful for the way it represents them.

The labor and suffrage anthem “Bread and Roses”

Indie rock superstar Lucy Dacus performed the labor anthem “Bread and Roses,” a song rooted in the early 20th-century labor and suffrage movements that enjoyed a second wave of popularity in the mid-century after Mimi Fariña, sister of Joan Baez, revived it.

The title comes from a 1911 speech by labor activist Rose Schneiderman, who argued that working people deserved not just survival wages but also dignity and beauty in their lives: “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”

In New York City, “Bread and Roses” is frequently performed by the NYC Labor Chorus, a volunteer ensemble of union members and allies that performs at strikes, rallies and labor events across the city.

An NYC trivia question

A throwaway line in Mamdani’s speech rewarded listeners with a brief brain teaser. “In a city where the mere names of our streets are associated with the innovation of the industries that call them home …” he began one line.

The mayor didn’t elaborate, but there are a number of examples: Madison Avenue was once synonymous with the advertising industry; Broadway and Wall Street, of course; and Tin Pan Alley, a stretch of West 28th Street, was the epicenter of American popular songwriting in the late 19th and early 20th century. The line doubled as a rhetorical flourish and a subtle bit of civic trivia.

A local life

In describing his NYC upbringing, Mamdani dropped references familiar to New Yorkers of different eras and backgrounds.

He mentioned the Razor scooters known to every child (and their nervous parents) from the zillennials on down.

He hailed the jumbo slices at Koronet Pizza near his childhood home in Morningside Heights — a staple food for every Columbia University student of a certain vintage.

And he made Hinge hopefuls’ hearts flutter when he spoke of taking his wife to McCarren Park for their first date.

Niche internet fluency

Mamdani, the only New York City mayor younger than the internet, is well-known for speaking its language fluently.

But the algorithm serves a million different internets to different communities, and Mamdani demonstrated his fluency with a fairly niche one with Babbulicious, the Punjabi performer who closed out his inauguration.

Babbulicious, a Toronto-based artist who gained attention for his meme-able song clips on social media, performed his biggest viral hit, “Gaadi Red Challenger,” subbing in “New York” for key Punjabi lyrics.

Since his viral debut, Babbu has “surpassed meme awareness into actual Punjabi music lexicon,” said Suri, who knows a thing or two about viral clips.

“The whole [inauguration] was extremely New York,” Suri added. “I was sitting next to a Guyanese cop, a white community organizer, and a Palestinian auntie. It was a vibe, for sure.”