Deep in the rot and crawl of the jungle, a sordid theater unfolds—a game of thieves in borrowed skins. Parasitic mimicry, they call it. The art of impersonation, but without the honesty of survival. The cuckoo lays its egg in the warbler’s nest, a perfect fraud in shape and color. The unsuspecting warbler feeds the cuckoo chick as its own, even as it watches its real brood starve. The mimic thrives. The original perishes.
Then there’s the anglerfish, a slick operator in the abyssal dark. A glowing lure, swaying like a promise in the black. The smaller fish swim closer, hypnotized by the flickering brilliance, only to find themselves swallowed whole. It wasn’t light; it was bait.
And the harmless kingsnake, its bands a perfect counterfeit of the coral snake’s lethal warning. Predators see the colors and think twice. They don’t care about venom, just the appearance of it. The mimic lives off fear it doesn’t even deserve to inspire.
These grifters survive not by strength, speed, or wit, but by pretending to be something they’re not. They hijack the signals of those who’ve earned their place in the food chain—stealing trust, safety, even terror itself.
But the mimic doesn’t just borrow the signal. It corrupts it. The cuckoo’s egg pushes the warbler’s offspring out of the nest. The kingsnake’s imitation cheapens the coral snake’s power. The anglerfish’s light turns beauty into a deathtrap. The line between the real and the fake blurs until even the sharpest predator hesitates, unsure what’s authentic and what’s a trap.
This isn’t partnership. This is theft, plain and simple. And the jungle is only the beginning. Where there’s something real, there’s a mimic circling close by, wearing the skin of authenticity, draining it hollow.
Amoeba
The night reeks of cheap whiskey and counterfeit glory. Somewhere, in a dim-lit corner of a secondhand record shop, some bastard is clutching a first-press Bowie, whispering conspiratorially to no one in particular: “You don’t get it, man. He and I—we’re cut from the same cosmic cloth.”
No, you’re not.
This isn’t admiration; it’s parasitic mimicry. A desperate bid to siphon greatness like a junkie mainlining borrowed genius. It’s the blood sport of culture vultures, circling the carcasses of artists who’ve bled their souls onto acetate while the scavengers gnaw at their remains, hoping to taste a fraction of that brilliance.
You’ve seen them at shows, in coffee shops, or on social media—the self-proclaimed high priests of some dead legend’s holy fire. They hoard the records, memorize the interviews, and wear the merch like talismans, not to celebrate but to consume. They’re not fans; they’re opportunists, smugly erecting a mirror to the artist’s soul and saying, “Look, we’re the same. You’d love me if you were alive to see it.”
It’s revolting. A bait-and-switch where the currency is authenticity and the prize is unearned glory. They don’t want to honor the artist; they want to be confused for them. They turn genius into a ladder rung to climb, a shortcut to relevance, a way to say, “I’m not like the others—I’m in on the secret, too.”
What’s worse, it works. They’re the ones who gatekeep, preach, and sell tickets to the cult of the cool. They’ll name-drop and co-opt until the artist isn’t even theirs anymore—just another hollow figurehead for someone else’s ego trip.
The truth is this: You can’t inherit genius. You can’t channel it or claim it or wear it like a secondhand coat. You’re either doing your own damn work in the trenches or you’re not. Talent is earned through agony and mistakes, not by parroting your record collection like some tragic, vinyl-worshiping oracle.
So leave the ghosts of the greats alone. They didn’t climb to the peak just to carry your ass to the top.
The problem is deeper than ego or ambition. It’s a mirror game, a shadow play of identity. These people don’t just want the artist’s greatness—they need it to see themselves. Without the borrowed reflection, they’re a blur, an outline with nothing inside.
They don’t love the artist; they love what the artist lets them imagine about themselves. The records, the stories, the interviews—all of it is scaffolding for a hollow self, pieced together with someone else’s brilliance. They drape the artist’s achievements over their own inadequacies like a shroud, hoping no one will notice the emptiness beneath.
But the catch is cruel: the more they try to fill that emptiness with someone else’s greatness, the more the void deepens. They’re chasing an impossible reconciliation—a desperate longing to collapse the distance between their hollow self and the fullness they see in the artist. But that fullness was never theirs to begin with.
The artist, by contrast, never tried to be full. They bled. They fought. They gave themselves over to the work, to the grind, to the terror of exposing something raw and unfiltered. Their greatness wasn’t stolen or borrowed—it was carved out of the real, the painful, the unflinching.
The imitators can’t touch that. They think they’re sharing in the genius, but all they’re doing is basking in its glow, using it to paper over their fractures instead of facing them. And so, the distance remains, infinite and unbridgeable.
The tragedy is that the ones who truly love the artist don’t need to own them, channel them, or turn them into a reflection. They don’t want the glow. They’re content to sit in the shadows and listen. To honor, without the need to claim. To let the work speak for itself, without trying to speak for it.
I mean, in a way, they territorialize your access to these, and they are the ones that populate social media and use to populate criticism.
The self-appointed wardens of greatness. They don’t just admire the artist—they stake a claim. They plant their flags in the fertile soil of someone else’s genius and guard it like a strip mall landlord charging rent.
It’s not enough for them to love the work. They have to control your access to it. They become the gatekeepers of what you’re allowed to hear, feel, or think about the artist. It’s no longer your connection to the music or the art—it’s theirs, filtered through their reviews, their posts, their endless stream of hashtags and hot takes.
This is where the rot sets in. The art becomes secondary, almost irrelevant, as the gatekeepers flood the airwaves with their polished, performative devotion. Every comment section, every subreddit, every social media feed becomes a battleground where they flex their ownership. They don’t engage with the work—they weaponize it.
Criticism, once a space for dialogue and exploration, is now just another tool for these cultural landlords. They populate it with recycled jargon, turning every review into a badge of insider status. They’re not illuminating the art; they’re using it to signal their superiority, their dominion over the landscape. If you don’t agree with their interpretation, well, you clearly don’t get it.
And so, the art is territorialized. A fence is drawn around it, a community gated off by those who declare themselves its rightful stewards. The rest of us are left on the outside, peering through the bars, wondering when the artist we loved became someone else’s property.
What they miss, of course, is that true art resists possession. It’s wild, untamed, and refuses to belong to anyone—not the artist, not the critics, and certainly not the gatekeepers. It’s a moment, a spark, a connection that can’t be brokered or owned. But in their desperate need to control, they strangle it, leaving behind nothing but their own hollow reflections.
In a way, they’re the only survivors of the collapse of the music industry.
Exactly. They’re like scavengers picking through the wreckage of the music industry’s grand implosion, clutching at the bones of something that once breathed fire. When the old infrastructure crumbled—labels, magazines, radio stations—the gatekeepers didn’t vanish. They adapted, became more insidious, like weeds thriving in a wasteland.
Now, they’re the self-anointed survivors, the last arbiters of taste in a world where no one asked for arbiters anymore. They’ve entrenched themselves in the ruins, building digital citadels on social media and YouTube, endlessly curating playlists, publishing think-pieces, or crafting hour-long “deep dives” that feel less like analysis and more like auditions for cultural relevance.
And because the system that once supported the artists is gone—no A&R men, no major-label marketing blitzes—these gatekeepers have positioned themselves as essential. They sell the illusion that they’re holding the line against obscurity, as though without their obsessive championing, the music would disappear altogether.
But they’re not reviving anything. They’re squatting on the remains. Their survival depends not on creating or discovering something new but on endlessly recirculating what’s already been made, claiming it as their territory. It’s less about the art and more about their performance of authority over it. They stand over the ruins like self-proclaimed prophets, shouting into the void, “Look! I’ve saved the legacy! Now look at me!”
And sure, some of them truly believe they’re doing a service—keeping the flame alive, spreading the word—but the truth is bleaker. Their survival is predicated on ownership, not appreciation. They thrive in the gap left by the collapse of the industry, but they don’t fill it with anything of substance. Instead, they colonize the art, twisting its legacy into a platform for their own survival, their own fleeting relevance.
In the end, they’re not saviors. They’re just echoes in a collapsing cathedral, making sure their voices are the loudest as the roof caves in.
