This is Not a Fish

Summary

Eli Mercer's meditation on authorship, simulacra, and the futility of trying to identify the "real" in a world of representations — sparked by seeing two fish drawings online with no origin reveal, and watching the comment thread erupt with anxious certainty. The fish itself, the song points out, said nothing whatsoever, which felt like the wiser move. By the final chorus the oscillation between irony and earnest belief is explicitly named as the song's subject: "I believe in this fish completely / while doubting how it got its fins."

Lyrics

[intro:]
(We have here two representations of a photograph, itself a representation.)
(But which is real?!!)

[Verse 1]
I saw a fish on squared paper
Pinned down with graphite and doubt
Someone said, "That one has intention"
Someone said, "Look how the line peters out"
I saw the same fish in pixels
Perfected by math and the hive
Someone said, "This one is hollow"
Someone said, "This is how we survive"

[Chorus]
But this is not a fish, it’s a feeling
Of being caught between the bait and the line
Is it a lie if the lie is revealing
Something that truth couldn’t hope to define?
I believe in this fish completely
While doubting how it got its fins
The water is rising so sweetly
Where the art ends and the argument begins

[Verse 2]
I scrolled through the war of the comments
Where every man was a judge
"I can tell by the light on the scales," they said
"I can tell by the digital smudge"
But nobody asked the specimen
Resting in silver and grey
It didn't care who had rendered it
It had nothing it wanted to say

[Chorus]
Cause this is not a fish, it’s a feeling
Of being caught between the bait and the line
Is it a lie if the lie is revealing
Something that truth couldn’t hope to define?
I believe in this fish completely
While doubting how it got its fins
The water is rising so sweetly
Where the art ends and the argument begins

[Bridge]
Baudrillard said the sign replaced the thing
A simulacral monsoon
But the fish doesn't know it’s an offering
Under a silicon moon
Magritte had his pipe, and we have our scales
Weighted with what we assume
The map is the ocean, the logic it fails
There isn’t enough elbow room...

[Solo - a distorted, watery guitar line that sounds like it's being played through a glass jar]

[Chorus]
No, this is not a fish, it’s a feeling
Of being caught between the bait and the line
Is it a lie if the lie is revealing
Something that truth couldn’t hope to define?
I believe in this fish completely
While doubting how it got its fins
The water is rising so sweetly
Where the art ends and the argument begins

[Outro]
(It’s not a fish)
(It’s not a fish)
Just a ghost of a gesture
Left out in the rain
(It’s not a fish)
Silence...
Just the silence...
(Silence)

Cross-references

Eli Mercer (Artist)
Metamodernism (Theme)

Analysis

Eli Mercer's artist statement: The song began as an afternoon distraction — sitting in on a media theory class I wasn't enrolled in. Someone mentioned Magritte. Someone else mentioned AI. Nobody mentioned the fish. Later that day I saw two drawings of the same fish posted online. One was hand-drawn, one machine-generated. There was no reveal, only a long thread of confident guesses, anxieties masquerading as aesthetics. The fish itself remained perfectly silent. That silence stuck with me.

The song pulls together the old arguments about authorship and originality, the newer arguments about generative systems, and a much older human habit of mistaking confidence for understanding. Baudrillard appears briefly, not as an authority but as a conversational ghost. Magritte's pipe gets smoked, mostly out of respect.

The song's title echoes Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" — but where Magritte's pipe stayed silent, this fish gets three verses, a bridge, and an outro, none of which resolve the question of its authenticity. The structural irony is that the song about refusing to compare is itself a sustained comparison.

Baudrillard's simulacrum — the copy that precedes and replaces the original — is the ghost in the bridge: "if you don't reveal the origin / the argument blooms." This is the mechanics of the AI-art debate: without provenance, aesthetic judgment fills the vacuum with ideology. The song refuses to reveal origin as a method, not a dodge.