Painfully Obvious And Incredibly Boring

The Cool Greenhouse “Alexa!”

“Alexa!,” a perky and snarky song about Amazon’s ubiquitous personal assistant AI, is right on the edge of novelty song status. The humor in the song is mostly observational or sly references to bugs in Amazon’s system, but as the song moves along it’s more like a biting critique of the product and its cultural implications than just a joke. The small and silly tone of the song is a Trojan horse for darker ideas about pandering to the wealthy, technology-induced cultural hegemony, and nonstop corporate surveillance, just as the benign and often malfunctioning device is a Trojan horse for Amazon’s more ambitious plans for gradually taking over everything it possibly can. Tom Greenhouse’s vocal performance is perfectly balanced here – he sells the quips, but doesn’t lean to hard into the subtext. He trusts you to get it.

Buy it from Bandcamp.