A Point of Pedantry

I like to shop at The Source, my local bulk foods health store. This is the sort of enterprise that thrives (to be honest, which probably only exists) in affluent, liberal enclaves like Crouch End in North London where I live. According to its marketing blurb The Source “helps the UK to shop healthy & fight against waste”. We Crouch Enders would probably argue that it should be “healthily” and not “healthy”, but despite this it seems a worthy endeavour. For those unfamiliar with the system: you go down to the shop with your food storage jars, put them on the scales, mark their empty weight on the bottom and then fill them with lentils, gluten-free muesli or organic matcha from the various containers. You then take your filled jars to the counter, have them weighed again and pay. It’s an exercise that doesn’t really save you any time or any money over just popping into Waitrose just down the road, and is one that probably only people without proper jobs (like most of us here in North London) have the leisure to do, but we walk out of the shop feeling virtuous.

Perhaps mindful of its ageing leftie clientele, the shop tends to play music from the 1960s. I went in recently to top up my pistachios and cranberries and was greeted by a bright and slightly cheesy piano solo emanating from the in-store sound system. This fired some synapse, which had lain dormant in my brain for fifty years and identified the song as She’s a Rainbow by the Rolling Stones. Pleased as I was to resurrect this ancient memory I questioned why my brain had bothered to remember this song at all, let alone the piano solo from it. It’s not Jagger-Richards’ finest work. It’s from that period of the Rolling Stones’ career in the mid-Sixties, when they stopped being a covers band and briefly wrote some catchy pop tunes, before deciding to reinvent themselves as rockers and pretend to be American. The lyrics are quite sweet, if a little hippy drippy, but the record was released in the Summer of Love (well, the Autumn of Love technically) so this is forgivable. Had the memory of this song been summoned to my conscious brain in a different context it might have earned me valuable points in a pub quiz, which could have been the clincher that helped my team win a £25 drinks voucher. But, as it was, this minor item of mental baggage I have been toting around through adolescence, university, most of a career and two marriages earned me nothing, apart a feeling of private pride (and I suppose getting to write this piece about it).

For some reason this reawakened memory was accompanied by a feeling of annoyance. Where was that coming from? The piano solo came to an end and Mick Jagger reprised the familiar words of the chorus “she comes in colours everywhere, she combs her hair.. She’s like a rainbow.” Hold on. Rewind. That’s it. That’s the source of my annoyance. Jagger sings “she’s like a rainbow”, but the title of the song is She’s a Rainbow. Is the girl he’s singing about actually a rainbow or is she just like one? Is this a metaphor or a simile? This is something that my daughter and I have just been revising on flash cards for her English exams.

Perhaps I’m on the spectrum, but this inconsistency over the spectrum being described in the song bugged me as a teenager. What happened? Did the artist who produced the cover of the single miss out the word “like” for reasons of design aesthetics or forgetfulness? Or were the band divided over the literary merits of the two figures of speech, with Mick and Brian arguing that it should be a simile and Keith and Bill making the case for a metaphor and Charlie sitting on the fence, so they went for a compromise option?

It’s the sort of anomaly that Captain Kirk in Star Trek might exploit to sabotage a rogue computer. “Computer, is the Rolling Stones song She’s a Rainbow an example of a simile or a metaphor?” he would ask it, smirking. The computer would cast its brain back from Star Date 4563.2 to 1967: “She’s a Rainbow is a metaphor because it is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy,” it would intone, before continuing “but the lyric of the song is “she’s like a rainbow”, so this is a simile, which is an expression comparing one thing with another, using the words “as” or “like”.. but the title of the song maintains that she is a rainbow, which is a metaphor, however the lyric of the chorus, comparing her with a rainbow, is clearly a simile…” The hapless machine would continue around this logic loop for a while, until smoke began to issue from it and it eventually melted into a mess of plastic.

The discrepancy is causing a similar meltdown in me now, fifty years on from the last time I heard the song. The Source with its lentils and environmental awareness is a throwback to the laid-back, hippy ethics of the Sixties, but, thanks to this Sixties song, as I leave the shop, in place of the accustomed feeling of virtuousness, I am now revisiting a keen half-century-old sense of annoyance.