Self-portrait, Courtesy the Artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

 Part I: Lana Del Rey

Some claimed that Lana Del Rey’s 2017 song “Get Free” was a rip-off of Radiohead’s iconic and self-masturbatory indie ballad “Creep,” which led to a rather unhinged and masculinist lawsuit. It seems that for women artists, homage or deconstruction or enjoyment or critique can all slide seamlessly and without conversation into fraudulence or a sort of frivolous game. This is to say nothing of still ongoing quests for (female, queer, POC) genius that are both necessary and regressive in their modernist preciousness. Of course, anything be similar and/or dissimilar to anything: bodies, one evocative wilderness or another, chord progressions, rainbows, discourses, bronze, women (largely) artists working at a certain place and in a certain time and in certain academically verified modes, photographs as such, lives, instances of falling in love. I will quote “Get Free” pretentiously “at length”:

There’s no more chasing rainbows
And hoping for an end to them
Their arches are illusions
Solid at first glance
But then you try to touch them (Touch, touch)
There’s nothing to hold on to (Hold, hold)
The colors used to lure you in (Shut up, shut up)
And put you in a trance (Ah, ah, ah, yeah)

I don’t know the outcome of the man-child Radiohead outcry, but I do know that if they won the battle, they did not win the war, for Lana already exposed the trance and all of its iterations, thus rendering the archetypal idea of a copy archetypally unnecessary.

There is a freedom and pleasure in living inauthentically and without originality. In the chorus of “Get Free,” just after her appeal to rainbows, Lana pleads, moving from one archetype to another:

Sometimes it feels like I’ve got a war in my mind
I want to get off, but I keep ridin’ the ride
I never really noticed that I had to decide
To play someone’s game or live my own life
And now I do
I wanna move
Out of the black (Out of the black)
Into the blue (Into the blue)

So, the movement toward optimism might be regimented, like the rainbow-turned-solid, or in the process of chalky decomposition. In any case, irrespective of the game she plays, she is still stuck within the colors of a bruise, and she and we love it.

Part II: Kermit the Frog

Kermit the Frog, like Lana Del Rey, knew that rainbows are the ultimate cliché, something that reproduces itself infinitely in ways that are life-giving and saccharine. They are a luxury (feminine, queer, hysterical, over-the-top, frilly, wasteful) but they are necessary. Despite their erotic curvature, rainbows are, in this way, akin to grids, bars, and the constraining heft of critique and deconstruction. On YouTube, you can find a “Rainbow Connection” duet sung by Kermit the Frog and Debbie Harry. Its wholesome and nostalgic spectacle is just that and nothing more and that has to be OK. In that moment, Debbie Harry was the Debbie Harry of Hairspray and not the Debbie Harry of the New Wave. But pretentiousness about genre is the worst kind. The fact that it is Debbie Harry of Hairspray with Kermit the Frog has to be OK in order for us to cope with the fact that the rainbow connection cannot be fulfilled

All of us under its spell

We know that it’s probably magic

And indeed, it must be magic, for it is being sung to us by a Muppet, whose only skull or trace is the puppeteer’s hand, and when the hand is retracted, there is nothing: only gauzy belief. But the magic lies in the fact that gauze cannot bruise, and that is solace enough. Debbie Harry has a skull though, but she does not offer it to Kermit or to us, and that is OK too.

Part III: Karen Carpenter

Gay men love Karen Carpenter, who did a beautiful cover of “Rainbow Connection” that was release posthumously in 1998, because all gay men (at least those, oftentimes, but not exclusively, of a certain age who were educated in the Judy Garland School) carry with them, inside, where the gauze is, a forced embrace of death, which is the ultimate form of unoriginality. And unoriginality is a form of wasting away, as is the evaporation of a rainbow in the indifferent sun or in the eyes of a cruel lover. And no one can be remarkable in wasting away, since we all do it—some more quickly and intentionally than others. But we hope nevertheless to waste away remarkably and create a legacy. Why are there so many songs about rainbows, and why are there so many narratives of death, which is another name for the master narrative of History? It is because the most reliable form of emotional nourishment is repetition, and it is the deepest form.

Allegedly, The Carpenters’ cover of “Rainbow Connection” was never meant to be released. Richard Carpenter joked, “If I ever released it, Karen would come down and get me!” This statement turns Karen Carpenter, feathered and wispy-to-death, into the Father and the Law, which seems flippant at best and cruel at worst. If Monet and Flaubert and Barthes were that thin, would we fear them? Would we disregard their wishes and listen blithely to and love their kitsch-adjacent recordings that they never wanted to see the light of day? It is irrelevant in some ways because no one regulates a man’s thinness, the space he takes up. Maybe if they were thinner like the immaterial bands of a rainbow, they and we might evade the pleasures and dangers of influence and history and death. Karen and Kermit and Lana and Sherrie know that in disappearing we can finally get free. They also know that a desire to reappear is not an indictment of our freedom.