As if the gays couldn’t take the overload enough as it was already, an accompanying video for “Rain on Me” has immediately followed the single’s release on Friday, May 22 (known to some as Morrissey’s birthday). Because it’s only right to kick off Gemini season with a duet of this dramatic nature, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande took the pas de deux to the next level by essentially melding into the Olsen twins by the end of the “futuristic” video (though, as we’ve seen, no concept centered on the future is really complete without some kind of face covering).
Directed by Robert Rodriguez (not exactly the most femme-friendly dude, if you’ll just ask Rose McGowan)–in what is only, surprisingly, his third music video–the violence tinge is prevalent enough as thousands of knives descend from the sky to stab at an already fraught Gaga and Grande (the alliteration of these two names making them ideal to start up a collection of nursery rhymes). Then again, knives as raindrops probably wouldn’t be the weirdest thing to happen in 2020. And yes, despite the knife wedged in her leg, Gaga, in her latex pink getup, continues to crawl along, miraculously finding the strength to bust out into full-fledged choreography with the rest of her sartorially coordinated dancers. The ground then does a flip to the Upside Down (not the one from Stranger Things) to reveal Ariana as a sort of foil or doppelganger dressed in purple and butterfly wings.
As the two dance in unison in their parallel universes, all at once, Gaga appears in Ari’s realm as though it’s the most natural thing in the world–like she’s been there all along and isn’t more in the vein of some sort of Bob from Twin Peaks apparition. And speaking of Black Lodge/White Lodge propensities, the two are soon suddenly wearing the exact same makeup (slightly amended for each pop star’s face) and now in pastel versions of the same latex getups they were wearing before. It’s all very disorienting.
In the background looms the generic metropolis (just assume it means New York, which is about as generic as it gets) one is meant to associate with freedom–the liberty to be oneself, because Lady G and Ariana have chosen to showcase a version of the city in which social distancing rules do not apply (oh wait, many Americans seem to think that anyway). And then–bam!–the two are both in separate parallel universes, meaning the pastels are together in one and the regular hues are together in the one they were formerly separate in–what kind of bizarre cloning experiment is afoot here? Suddenly, they’re holding hands and they both have the same Ariana in the “7 Rings” video-length hair, free-flowing and practically whipping us in the face with such three-dimensional quality.
Have they entered into a version of Dostoyevsky’s The Double, or do they merely have a new best friend accord in the barely two minutes that have gone by at this point in the video? Soon enough, Lady G is even the same shade of tan as Grande, as though she really has the exact olive undertone thanks to her own claim to Italian origins. Though she clearly wasn’t as proud as Grande about it in order to leave the Germanotta surname (which, obviously, she pronounces as “Jerm-uh-nah-tah” instead of the correct “Germa-noh-teh”).
Regardless of whether it’s their shared Italian ties that make them look like twinsies out of the blue, the resemblance is only occasionally broken up by the sight of Gaga getting “rain” (a.k.a. a bucket of water from someone holding it above her) poured over her in the style of Madonna in the “Rain” video. After all, even if they’re “twins” by the conclusion, Gaga still wants to remind you who the “star” of the outfit is. Even though she learned the hard way with Beyonce that choosing more, shall we say, vocally adept partners makes it easy to outshine her in a duet scenario.
