Between Blinking Aisles

Rozie Ramati and the Imperial Anesthetic

In 1955, Allen Ginsberg walked into a supermarket in Berkeley, California, and saw Walt Whitman poking among the pork chops. The vision became a poem, and the poem became a tradition. Seventy years later, a twenty-three-year-old Mexican-Ashkenazi singer-songwriter from Los Angeles released a track called “Blinking Aisles” that picks up where Ginsberg left off, updates the address, and strips away the Cold War irony.

Rozie Ramati is not yet a household name, drawing roughly 59,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and 60,000 followers on Instagram. Her breakout track, “Orange Juice,” went semi-viral on TikTok in 2022, after which she taught herself ukulele, guitar, songwriting, and production in her bedroom. Having studied Chicano literature and Holocaust testimony at UCLA, she released “Blinking Aisles” in September 2025, following a full year of delays marked by creative doubt and a fraught political climate. The song lifts directly from Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “America” and grafts it onto our current fractured reality. The result is a remarkably trenchant lyrical indictment of American imperial life in recent popular music.

The Fluorescent Scroll

In the chorus, Ramati sings:

I dig my hands in bags of paradise / I squeeze until I find the noose / We search for meaning between blinking aisles / But can’t turn them off to find the truth

The phrase “bags of paradise” evokes both grocery bags and the consumer promise of abundance and choice, framing the American supermarket as a secular Eden. Yet, inside this bag lies a noose, suggesting the promise of plenty contains its own instrument of death.

The phrase “blinking aisles” operates on two levels: the fluorescent-lit corridors of the supermarket—Ginsberg’s territory—and the glowing screens through which most Americans now consume information, entertainment, and each other. Ramati herself has explicitly confirmed this reading. In a recent essay, she noted that the algorithmic feed “is more true to a ‘blinking aisle,’ which allows us to endlessly scroll without seeing an obvious pattern in what we consume”. The imagery of “blinking” captures how these aisles do not illuminate but rather flicker with intermittent, inescapable stimulation. The subsequent lines reveal this dynamic:

All my humanness is numbed in absent hours / And my youth is slipping off the monkey bars

Herbert Marcuse would have recognized this sentiment immediately. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argued that advanced capitalism replaces genuine needs with manufactured desires, leaving people comfortable but pacified, unable to articulate what they have lost because the loss itself has been administered away. Ramati actively diagnoses this exact modern machinery, stating that these platforms set the public up to be “controlled, divided, and profited off of by algorithms and billionaires,” with a core goal to “make us insecure, overwhelmed, and divided.” These “absent hours” are not leisure; they are time subtracted from lived experience, spent scrolling, consuming, and dissociating. The colonization of interiority by consumer capitalism does not announce itself as conquest. It masquerades as convenience, as content, and as the soft glow of the fluorescent scroll. Youth does not simply conclude—it slips away. It mimics a child losing their grip on a playground fixture, the body giving out before the mind registers the fall.

The song then asks:

Will I live for love? Or live for blinking aisles? / Who can afford the first? Not me or you

The dilemma is strictly economic. Love, connection, and a life lived rather than consumed require time, stability, housing, and freedom from the grind of not knowing whether rent will clear. Ramati frames the choice between love and consumption not as a matter of character, but as a structural failure. Nobody can afford love, and the aisles keep blinking because the alternative has been priced out of reach.

The Verse as Testimony

The second verse delivers dispatches from these systemic failures. “There’s a landlord burning dollars on my chin” renders the housing crisis as a bodily assault. The landlord does not merely extract rent but weaponizes wealth by burning currency against skin, allowing capital to write its name on the tenant’s body. In the line “There’s a raven on an olive branch,” the universal symbol of peace is occupied by a bird traditionally associated with death, war, and ill omen. Peace has been colonized by its opposite, effectively describing an American foreign policy where the language of diplomacy is deployed to authorize destruction. When “the dairy man tells the girl to bring a smile / So she spits on him to feel like it,” workplace harassment is met with a defiance born of exhaustion rather than strength. She spits to simulate the sensation of agency; resistance here amounts to pantomime.

The moral center of the track is laid bare with the lines:

There’s a divot on my pinky, I’m in style / While there’s babies belly deep in wells of sand

Here, a minor cosmetic blemish is elevated to a fashion statement and set against the visceral image of children buried in sand. Ramati has stated publicly that the ongoing Palestinian plight catalyzed the creation of “Blinking Aisles”. While she has not glossed every line, these lyrics—written by someone who explicitly named Gaza as the song’s catalyst—suggest that entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble with children trapped beneath. Ramati places American vanity and Palestinian death in the same sentence, letting the stark juxtaposition serve as the editorial itself.

The artist then turns inward:

Well I’ll tell you, Plum, there’s more than blinking aisles / There’s a man you haven’t spit on yet

“Plum” is Ramati’s moniker, drawn from her Plum Enthusiast testimony archive, a project she built during the Los Angeles fires of January 2025 using principles learned in her Holocaust studies at UCLA. Her professors impressed upon her the idea that witnessing is essential because authoritarian regimes destroy both people and the record of their experience. Watching misinformation flood platforms during the fires, Ramati recognized this historical amnesia and built the archive to collect first-person accounts, pairing them with a reading list. Without institutional support, this bedroom pop artist provided a space for people to bear witness. This act of documentation is not merely parallel to her music; it is the engine driving it. In her newsletter, she explicitly linked the release of the track to the archive, urging her audience to share their own testimonies. The lyric functions as a self-instruction reminding her that the aisles are not the whole world, and there remain targets for legitimate fury that have not yet been confronted.

The Ginsberg Inheritance

The song expands as Ramati quotes nearly verbatim from Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “America”:

America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing / America I can’t stand my own mind / America when will we end the human war?

Although Ramati has not explicitly cited Ginsberg as a source, the intertext is unmistakable, mimicking the exact opening words of Ginsberg’s poem. Ginsberg wrote his version during the Cold War, addressing America as a lover who had betrayed him and a body politic that consumed its citizens. Ramati’s adoption of these lines is an inheritance rather than a pastiche, claiming Ginsberg’s tradition of direct address and extending it into a present in which wars have multiplied, and supermarket aisles exist in the palm of every hand.

Yet Ramati adds lines Ginsberg never wrote. “America why are your libraries full of tears?” points toward the defunding of public institutions and the book bans sweeping the country. “America why don’t you take off your clothes?” demands transparency from a nation concealing the machinery of its violence. She separates herself from Ginsberg entirely with the closing line: “America the plum blossoms are falling”. Where Ginsberg concluded “America” with a sardonic resolution to put his “queer shoulder to the wheel,” Ramati ends with an image of natural beauty in decay. In East Asian traditions, plum blossoms signify endurance surviving frost, but here, the symbol of resilience is giving way. The laughter that closes the song carries no defiance or program for the future; it is the involuntary sound of someone watching every symbol of resistance fail.

Naming the Anesthetic

The hypocrisy Ramati identifies is an indictment of the civilization itself, measuring America’s claims of democracy, liberty, and sanctuary against realities like ICE raids, children in rubble, unaffordable housing, and a totalizing screen feed. The aisles keep blinking because the stimulation is the imperial project. Compliance is produced and attention captured before it can be directed toward the falling plum blossoms or the very real suffering in the world.

Ramati joins a tradition of artists, from Whitman to Ginsberg to Kneecap and Bob Vylan, who address America in the second person to indict its imperial hypocrisy. While one might object that Ramati’s audience of 59,000 listeners risks preaching to the choir, or that a younger artist quoting a dead poet seems to be appropriating authority instead of establishing her own, these criticisms miss the power of her original verse images. The landlord burning dollars, the raven on the olive branch, and the babies in sand prove that while the Ginsberg lines provide the frame, the original imagery forms her deeply earned argument.

While this textual analysis does not comprehensively address the musical composition, such as Ramati’s 1930s vibrato or the shift in vocal register that accompanies the raw direct address of the Ginsberg section, the words alone perform a critical function. “Blinking Aisles” succeeds where much political music fails by exposing the anesthetic. It identifies how imperial violence is made tolerable to those who fund it with their taxes and complicity. Ultimately, the song asks who can afford love in a civilization organized around the blinking aisle. While the track itself leaves the listener with the unsentimental verdict of “not me or you,” Ramati views this bleakness as a prerequisite for resistance. As she writes of the song’s underlying demand: “We might not be able to afford the first, but that simply means we need to defend our right to.”