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There's No Such Thing as Indigo

from On the Spectrum by Mayhem Lettuce

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about

We recorded this is in Chicago in 2013. It may have been originally conceived for the upcoming Complete Sentences album.

lyrics

Isaac Asimov once said "It is customary to list indigo as a color lying between blue and violet, but it has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate color. To my eyes it seems merely deep blue."
And I agree with that. I've never understood Indigo. It's almost never even depicted the same way. Sometimes it is, as Asimov said, a deep blue. Sometimes it's shown as a full-on purple. Sometimes it's very much in what I consider pink's jurisdiction. What the hell?

And talking of purple, what's the deal with purple and violet? My brain organizes colors based on Crayola's designations and so purple and violet are synonyms to me. And they probably are to you too.
Now, I know that in Color Theory violet is the color next to blue that helps make up white light and purple is a mix of any shade of red or violet and white, meaning that no pure light source can produce purple.
Purple is impure. Purple is vague. Purple exists outside the spectrum. Purple is a category of colors. Purple is magenta and pink and fuchsia and all sorts of other colors that Crayola clearly has names for.
Violet is a color and purple is an abstract and esoteric concept.

But what of Indigo?
Indigo is bullshit.

Indigo was made up by Sir Isaac Newton when he prismed white light into its component bits and discovered the spectrum of colors of which visible light is composed. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Newton wanted there to be 7 colors to match the 7 musical notes of the major scale and the 7 planets of which humans were, at that time, aware.

And, perhaps most weirdly, the 7 days of the week. He really needed them all to match up. Colors, music and planets I can dig as they are all great big elements of the natural world. But the days of the week are an arbitrary man-made construct. Like Indigo. For, you see, Newton invented Indigo, forcing this nonsensical, nonexistent wedge between blue and violet for his own weird, aesthetic, quasi-religious purposes.

Plus, Crayola didn't even HAVE an Indigo crayon until the year 2000, some 340 years after Newton crammed it into our rainbow ensuring that children would be forever bewildered by this mythological half-blue, half-purple crypto-color. So, you know, there's that.

credits

from On the Spectrum, released December 4, 2020
Grahm Eberhardt - vocals, keyboards
Wade Saathoff - guitars, bass, drums and percussion

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Mayhem Lettuce Port Byron, Illinois

Mayhem Lettuce was formed in Port Byron, IL in 1993 when two sad teenage boys decided to channel their angst into music.
That music sits at the crossroads of King Missile and Portishead with a dash of The Cure and a pinch of They Might Be Giants.

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