IMO there is no way a musician name drops a product without collecting a bag. The interview with Amazon would also have cost them money to make happen.

Weezer would need to be astonishingly naive to write the song before the agreement was reached with Amazon. Also other comments in this thread detail their past record of selling out.

I listen to quite a lot of hip-hop and there were a couple of years about a decade ago where almost every artist had a lyric about uber.

Yeah I was thinking it was Grapes of Wrath. It makes sense, the song's whole point was River's pandemic-era hobbies, and Audible blew up in the pandemic. I feel this rant is just the author projecting their anti-Amazon mindset onto a band they dislike. Sure, Amazon is terrible, but I doubt they would pay Weezer of all bands to promote Audible. Maybe its just my youthful optimism and love of Weezer clouding my rationality, but I feel like this is just another "old man yells at cloud".

Oh, good. So it's not paid stupidity, it's genuine stupidity.

Also doesn’t seem like it was paid placement

I'm not so sure on that. At the very least they paid him for the interview there, and really I think they probably just made out that they didn't find out beforehand.

It's pretty ridiculous to think that a band that's been in the business as long as Weezer has, signed to a major label like Atlantic Records, wouldn't ask for permission to use someone else's brand in one of their songs.