I’d be remiss to not comment the tounge-in-cheek moniker of AMAZONDOTCOM—right? Her SoundCloud bio simply reads “product reviews,” a reference to a Buzzfeed-ish subculture filled with an odd mixture of both irony and earnestness. Reviewers’ pretense aside, most shoppers—at least, at a rudimentary level—end up trusting the amount of stars on any given amazon product, hesitant to purchase anything with less than four. Despite keeping faith with these ratings, I don’t think people give a fuck about the veracity of the reviews, but whether or not enough people have given the product attention, tried it out, and had a reaction to it. Besides, at the end of the day, people are just trying to buy something and move on.
And this is a bit tangential (this entire post is, really), but how about Amazon’s Whole Foods purchase? Amazon’s cashier-less grocery stores are an ominous foreboding for a world where shopping centers and local shops are already experiencing degeneration. And as automation and machine-learning grows ever more conspicuous, capitalism and labor at large will transform into something hardly recognizable. Provincial shops and friendly cashiers will become a distant memory. For better or worse, the landscape of our economy will drastically change in both functionality and appearance, just as it has so many times before when new technologies (controlled by major business conglomerates) replace the old.
I digress. Is AMAZONDOTCOM’s name an ode to hyper-centralized retail outlets? Probably not. I could sit here all day picking back the layers of meaning surrounding the name choice, but I don’t know if the artist in question has given much thought to it, or cares. Maybe it’s just something picked out of sheer boredom, or maybe there’s a personal story behind it. Who knows. What’s true enough, though, is that it’s more fun to put all this name-analysis-mumbo-jumbo aside and enjoy AMAZONDOTCOM’s music, which has fascinating sound design and brooding rhythms, sort of poppy/clubby with all the ardor of a producer navigating the fringes of dance music via the internet. And there’s even a Too Short acapella thrown in at the end (Your mind is gone / Your brain is blazed / For the last three days / poppin’ pills). What more could you ask for?
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