“A Cleveland radio station says it has stopped playing ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ after listeners said the song heard on countless holiday playlists is inappropriate.” – The Associated Press (12/1/18)
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As Christmas approaches, it’s once again time to rehash the old debate: Should we, as a society, still be listening to the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”?
Clearly, in today’s current climate, this song has not aged well. Not in the slightest. But, while it’s all too easy to condemn this tune for its many failings, we still need to remember that, at its core, this song is simply a relic from a different era…
An era when it could actually still get cold outside.
Calm down. I know how I sound right now… But let’s just consider the facts for a second.
Folks, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was written over seventy years ago. It comes from a completely different culture from the one we currently live in. See, back in 1944 (when this song was first written), our planet still had the ability to get cold during the winter. That’s just how things were done back then.
So sure, while this song may seem problematic right now, we’ve got to remember that, when Frank Loesser wrote the song over seven decades ago, he didn’t do it maliciously. No. He did it because, back then, the Earth could still get cold. That was just the climate our planet had in the ’40s. And, for better or worse, this song reflects the norms and customs of this era.
I know it sounds crazy, but back then it was literally cold outside.
That’s just something that happened during the winter.
More importantly, before we ban this song forever, we’ve got to remember that the actual language of 1944 was completely different from our own modern rhetoric.
Folks, the English language has evolved so much in the past seven decades. And in today’s modern era, phrases that we may find offensive were, back in 1944, perfectly innocuous.
For example, in the fourth verse of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” when the male singer suggests that “baby, you’ll freeze out there,” it wasn’t some sort of caged, suggestive metaphor. Gosh no. He was just literally stating that, in the 1940s, the Earth’s environment could still get cold enough to cause a person’s skin to freeze – that was just something they said back then.
And when the female singer states “lend me a coat,” it wasn’t for some perverse, deviant reason…
It was just the rhetoric of an era where people still wore coats!
Look, folks. I get it. I get why this song is so polarizing… This morning, the temperature in my home city of Chicago was a balmy 45 degrees. In mid-December. It is the middle of winter in Chicago, and I left my apartment wearing a light windbreaker and chinos…
With this in mind, I can personally appreciate why “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is so offensive to so many people. But folks, while this song is clearly an outdated relic of a now-unrecognizable past, at this juncture, it would simply be irresponsible to brush this incredibly influential song under the rug and discard it forever.
Wait. Never mind.
I just listened to the song again. It’s… pretty rapey.
Maybe we should just scrap it?