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Baby It's Cold Outside (Controversy)

  

Category:  Op/Ed

Via:  johnrussell  •  6 years ago  •  38 comments

Baby It's Cold Outside (Controversy)
Those against the song say it promotes date rape, describing a man pressuring a woman to stay despite her adamantly telling him "no, no, no." But supporters argue that context is important, and when the song was written 70 years ago, it had a different meaning. 

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T



This has always been one of my favorite winter songs. This is a good version of it too. 

====================================================

The 1944 Christmas tune "Baby, It's Cold Outside" has been banned by radio stations across the country – and even in Canada – for its lyrics that some say are inappropriate in the wake of the #MeToo movement.  

Those against the song say it promotes date rape, describing a man pressuring a woman to stay despite her adamantly telling him "no, no, no." But supporters argue that context is important, and when the song was written 70 years ago, it had a different meaning. 

Here are the complete lyrics from the 1944 version of the now-controversial song: 

(I really can't stay) But, baby, it's cold outside
(I've got to go away) But, baby, it's cold outside
(This evening has been) Been hoping that you'd drop in
(So very nice) I'll hold your hands they're just like ice

(My mother will start to worry) Beautiful, what's your hurry
(My father will be pacing the floor) Listen to the fireplace roar
(So really I'd better scurry) Beautiful, please don't hurry
(Well, maybe just half a drink more) Put some records on while I pour

(The neighbors might think) Baby, it's bad out there
(Say what's in this drink) No cabs to be had out there
(I wish I knew how) Your eyes are like starlight now
(To break this spell) I'll take your hat, your hair looks swell

(I ought to say no, no, no, sir) Mind if I move in closer
(At least I'm gonna say that I tried) What's the sense of hurting my pride
(I really can't stay) Baby, don't hold out
[Both] Baby, it's cold outside

(I simply must go) But, baby, it's cold outside
(The answer is no) But, baby, it's cold outside
(The welcome has been) How lucky that you dropped in
(So nice and warm) Look out the window at the storm

(My sister will be suspicious) Gosh your lips look delicious
(My brother will be there at the door) Waves upon a tropical shore
(My maiden aunt's mind is vicious) Gosh your lips are delicious
(But maybe just a cigarette more) Never such a blizzard before

(I got to get home) But, baby, you'd freeze out there
(Say lend me a coat) It's up to your knees out there
(You've really been grand) I thrill when you touch my hand
(But don't you see) How can you do this thing to me

(There's bound to be talk tomorrow) Think of my life long sorrow
(At least there will be plenty implied) If you caught pneumonia and died
(I really can't stay) Get over that hold out

[Both] Baby, it's cold outside

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2018/12/06/baby-its-cold-outside-all-lyrics-controversial-song/2229909002/

==============================================================

But you'll have to pry "Baby, It's Cold Outside" from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. A world without "Baby, It's Cold Outside" would be very cold indeed.

Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/7630/baby-its-cold-outside

This week's Song of the Week comes by way of request. I've been bombarded by emails from readers demanding to know what I think of a limp, inert rewrite of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" in which the bloke has no wish to persuade her to stay - ostensibly because he "respects" her, but, to judge from the record, because the two of them have absolutely zero chemistry, sexual or otherwise.

This creepily bloodless appropriation of another man's creation was driven by the belief, apparently widespread among the youth of today, that this charming duet is in fact a rape scenario. So anyway here's how the new version kicks off:


SHE: I really can't stay
HE: Baby, I'm fine with that...


...and it's downhill from there, not least in its indifference to rhyme:


SHE: I ought to say 'No no no'
HE: I respect your right to say no...


God Almighty: Is there anything Generation Snowflake can't wreck? As I remarked on the radio, perhaps a tad mordantly, the mullahs can't nuke us soon enough.

But, in a more generous mood, one can see why a 72-year-old standard might become an object of fascination. In its first couple of decades, this song was popular, but now it's everywhere. My theory is that that's because the only thing holding up the music industry now is celebrity duets, and there aren't that many songs written expressly for two persons to sing. Hence, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" as sung by Rod Stewart & Dolly Parton, Norah Jones & Willie Nelson, Cee Lo Green & Christina Aguilera, Natalie Cole & James Taylor, Ron Paul & Sandra Fluke, etc. Miss Jessica Martin and I essayed a few bars of it at the start of our " Sweet Gingerbread Man ", and there's also a very sly musical reference to it right at the end of " The King's New Clothes ". And, for good measure, we threw in a couplet or two in our epic version of " Heart And Soul ". And, because of that, folks started writing in suggesting that, as a follow-up, for our next Christmas release we do a full-scale "Baby, It's Cold..." I demurred, in part because I thought it was kinda cool to be the only singing duo that doesn't have a record of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" out there, but also because I didn't feel I had anything new to add to the song. Tootling around the other day, I heard two new versions within ten minutes of each other - Seth MacFarlane & Sara Bareilles and Colbie Caillat & Gavin DeGraw. The latter I thought coarse and witless, and the former was just rather bland, which pains me to say because, among the musicians playing on the MacFarlane/Bareilles record, are trumpeter Pat White and tenor sax Howard McGill, who are also playing on my own humble musical offerings .

Some years ago, my late BBC comrade Alistair Cooke took a young friend to New York's famous Plaza Hotel, where a pianist was gaily tinkling. As Alistair enthused about each song, it gradually dawned on him that these familiar standards by Gershwin and Kern were entirely unfamiliar to his callow companion. I experience a slightly more unsettling form of cultural dislocation each Christmas season: People still know the songs, but have no idea what they mean. "Baby, It's Cold Outside is a fun song, but one line in particular is apparently a major micro-aggression that come December is mass-triggering the safe-spaced generation across our winter wonderland:


SHE:The neighbors might think . . .
HE: But baby, it's bad out there.
SHE: Say, what's in this drink?
HE: No cabs to be had out there . . .


As Mollie Hemingway remarked, "My feminist friends assure me that this is really a song about date rape and roofies." I'd like to think her feminist friends are maybe half-joking, or at any rate half her feminist friends are quarter-joking, and it's merely their way of deriding the obsolete "gender roles" of man as the seducer and the gal as the receiving end. I mean, they're not seriously arguing it's about drugging a woman into sex, are they? If it were, wouldn't it be available as a celebrity duet between Bill Cosby & [Insert Name Here]?

The song dates from ...well, a lost world. Frank Loesser wrote it in 1944 not for a show or a film but for a housewarming party. So that night in their new flat in the Navarro Hotel in New York he and his wife Lynn wowed a showbiz crowd with the first performance:


SHE: I really can't stay...
HE: But Baby, It's Cold Outside!
SHE: I've got to go 'way...
HE: But Baby, It's Cold Outside!


Richard Rodgers, never the most generous man, pronounced it "brilliant". Back then, everyone got it. You want the girl to stay, just another hour . . . okay, half . . . okay, 20 minutes: "Give me Five Minutes More, only Five Minutes More," as Frank Sinatra pleaded around the same time. And if Sinatra needs to plead, who doesn't? But nice girls go — or at least insist on being talked into staying:


SHE: I ought to say, 'No no no, sir!'
HE: Mind if I move in closer?


But seduction is superfluous in the hook-up era. I chanced to be in a Vermont bookstore the other day and overheard two teenagers' plans for the evening gang agley because (if I understood correctly) she had texted him an insufficiently gynecological pic for him to warrant investing an hour or two in a first "date." I'm sure it's all much better to get this stuff up front without a lot of coy byplay, but it's harder to get a song out of it.

By 1944 Frank Loesser the lyricist had become his own composer. Previously, he'd supplied the words to melodies by Hoagy Carmichael ("Two Sleepy People"), Burton Lane ("I Hear Music"), Frederick Hollander ("See What The Boys In The Backroom Will Have") and Jule Styne ("I Don't Want To Walk Without You"). But during the war, while working on "Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition", he found himself with no tune to hand and so wrote it himself. And, after that, the only composing partner he needed was himself.

There are a few genuinely self-contained songwriters, equally adept at both words and music – Cole Porter, Irving Berlin – and there are others who've gone from one to the other as and when needed. But Loesser is a rare case in that for the first decade of his career as a professional lyricist he gave absolutely no indication that he had a note of music in him. Courtesy of the Steyn archives, the late Burton Lane, who wrote many songs with Frank, sheds some light on that in our Loesser centenary special . But Jule Styne (who can also be heard on that two-CD special) puts it this way: "Here's a fellow with hardly any musical education, and he took it on and wrote some marvelous songs. But he had a right to write his own music. Certain fellows, who shall be nameless, haven't. But Loesser had; he could write his own music, He told me, 'Listen, after I write with you and Arthur Schwartz and Hoagy Carmichael, and this one and that one, by God, I have got to learn something, if I'm smart. You boys showed me how it goes.'"

Yet he remained a songwriter rather than a "composer". First, he had a genius for song ideas – "Let's Get Lost": What a terrific premise for a romantic ballad.

Second, he also appreciated what his brother Arthur, the "serious" composer in the family, called "the power and pleasure that comes from well-chosen words." In " What Are You Doing New Year's Eve? ", the "well-chosen words" are: "Ah, but in case I stand one little chance/Here comes the jackpot question in advance." Loesser was sure enough in his choices to know you could put a slang phrase like "jackpot question" on those dreamy notes and make it seem the height of romantic intoxication.

Third, he understood how "well-chosen words" should be sung, which is why eventually he no longer needed anyone to supply the notes. If you listen to, say, Dinah Shore or Peggy Lee or k d lang sing " I Wish I Didn't Love You So ", the plaintive ache in that title phrase is one of the very best unions of words and music in the repertoire.

My sense of Loesser is that he came at the music from the song idea and how best to serve it. Two numbers from the Forties serve to make the point. You can look on them as a Neptune's Daughter medley. Do you know Neptune's Daughter ? MGM, 1949, a fun little film, with Metro's mermaid Esther Williams, plus Ricardo Montalban, Red Skelton, Betty Garrett, Xavier Cugat. The plot, if I recall, is something to do with a South American polo team, mistaken identity, a Teach-Yourself-Spanish record, the usual stuff. But we have this silly piece of fluff to thank for two great Frank Loesser songs – or actually, to be more precise, one great Frank Loesser song that was written for Neptune's Daughter but wasn't really used in it, and another great Frank Loesser song that wasn't written for Neptune's Daughter , but wound up in it anyway. Between them, they embody Loesser at his Forties pop peak.

To start with the later song, how about this ?

I'd love to get you
On A Slow Boat To China
All to myself
Alone...

Where'd that come from? Well, it was an expression used by poker players to refer to guys who lost steadily and reliably and lavishly: "Boy, I'd like to get you on a slow boat to China" – ie, a journey that's about as far as you can go on which I can take you to the cleaners to my heart's content. But not until Loesser did anyone think, "Hey, there's a love song in this." That's what I mean about his genius for song ideas.

But, of course, once you get the idea, the trick is to extend it through 32 bars. Loesser follows up with one of my very favorite rhymes in the entire popular songbook:

Out on the briny
With a moon big and shiny
Melting your heart of stone...

"Briny"/"shiny" isn't clever – not Cole Porter/Noel Coward/Stephen Sondheim clever, not look-at-me clever, but it's wonderfully fresh, and it's particular to the song. "Slow Boat To China" is the only number with that rhyme, now and forever.

Loesser was contracted by MGM to write the songs for Neptune's Daughter , and figured the number would be great for Esther Williams.

As for the rest of the score, Loesser finally thought it was time to let the wider world in on his and Mrs Loesser's half-decade-old party piece - the duet for "wolf" and "mouse":

SHE: I really can't stay...
HE: But Baby, It's Cold Outside!
SHE: I gotta go 'way...
HE: But Baby, It's Cold Outside!

Thomas L Riis, in his somewhat academic survey of Loesser for the Yale University Press Broadway Masters series, has a fascinating section on "Loesser and Counterpoint", in which he notes the number of contrapuntal tunes in the composer's catalogue: "Contrapuntal", at least for pop purposes, means two or more singers singing different things on top of each other. For example, Loesser's marvelously inspired opening to Guys And Dolls - the "Fugue For Tinhorns" - has a trio of gamblers each boasting that he's "got the horse right here". In a way, it's a brilliant musicalization of the source material - a "Broadway fugue" is the perfect musical equivalent of the stylized vernacular Damon Runyon used in the stories that inspired the musical. But Loesser is not driven by the same motivations as Bach.

Riis hits on a much more useful term when he refers to Loesser's fondness for "interruptive duets". In Guys And Dolls , Miss Adelaide and Nathan Detroit finally get their big love duet - after a fashion. She unleashes a blizzard of machine-gun nagging:

You promise me this!
You promise me that !
You promise me everything under the sun!

But then the small-time, no-account crap-game promoter interrupts her shrill twittering with a big broad legato protestation:

Call a lawyer and
Sue Me
Sue Me
What would you do me?
I love you...

Which is the point: Basic boy-meets-girl but tailored to the specifics of this particular boy and girl. For the "wolf" and "mouse" of "Baby, It's Cold Outside", Loesser uses an entirely different tack:

SHE: My mother will start to worry...
HE: Beautiful, what's your hurry?
SHE: And Father will be pacing the floor...
HE: Listen to the fireplace roar!
SHE: So really I'd better scurry...
HE: Beautiful, please, don't hurry
SHE: Well, maybe just a half a drink more...
HE: Put some records on while I pour...

As Thomas Riis writes:

With one rhythmic idea, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" uses the standard ABAC format of thirty-two measures and adds an unremarkable chord progression for foundation, yet its cumulative effect is so impressive that Loesser can be said to have built his little tune into a miniature dramatic scene, a scena in the operatic sense, in which two characters and the nature of their relationship are fully sketched with efficiency and emotional clarity. The call-and-response conversation of the characters is fraught with humor, danger, and suggestiveness.

Riis compares "Baby, It's Cold Outside" to "Mozart's celebrated seduction duet 'La ci darem la mano'". You mean, because, like Loesser, Wolfgang was also a wolf with gang-rape on his mind? No, no, Professor Riis means the song is "a model of monomotivic development". But you feel Loesser got closer to a characterization of the form when he said he liked to write songs in "concurrent speech". In other words, whether Mozart works better as a "seduction duet" depends on who's got whom on whose bearskin rug, but clearly "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is a seduction duet rendered in the American vernacular, in musicalized "concurrent speech":

SHE: I've got to get home
HE: But baby, you'll freeze out there
SHE: Say, lend me a comb
HE: It's up to your knees out there...

At that housewarming party in New York at the Navarro Hotel, the Loessers introduced "Baby, It's Cold Outside" to their friends. As Lynn Loesser recalled:

Well, the room just fell apart. I don't think either of us realized the impact of what we'd sung. We had to do it over and over again and we became instant parlor room stars. We got invited to all the best parties for years on the basis of 'Baby'. It was our ticket to caviar and truffles. Parties were built around our being the closing act.

As Richard Adler, Frank's protégé, once told me, Lynn Loesser was a domineering woman. She was known around town, somewhat inevitably, as "the evil of the two Loessers", a gag that's stuck to her beyond the grave. You wonder sometimes whether her reputation hasn't simply adjusted itself to a joke too good to pass up. Certainly, on her demonstration records with her husband, she's very charming – and never more so than on "Baby, It's Cold Outside". Through the mid-Forties, Loesser held on to the number and he and Lynn performed it as their party piece at celebrity get-togethers in New York and Hollywood. Lynn Loesser loved the song, loved singing it, and loved the fact that it was theirs alone.

But business is business. And in 1948 Frank Loesser sold the song to MGM for Neptune's Daughter . "I felt as betrayed as if I'd caught him in bed with another woman," huffed Mrs Loesser. "I kept saying 'Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban?'"

Her husband figured it this way : "If I don't let go of 'Baby' I'll begin to think I can never write another song as good as I think this one is."

It's the highlight of the picture – Ricardo Montalban putting the moves on Esther Williams . A couple of years back, when I protested that I had nothing new to add to "Baby, It's Cold Outside", some listeners responded, "Hey, switch things around: Make Jessica the predator, and you the one trying to resist." But that switcheroo's as old as the song: in the movie, after Ricardo hits on Esther, it's immediately followed by a bit of role reversal from the comedy support, with a man-eating Betty Garrett pursuing Red Skelton. It brought Loesser his fourth Oscar nomination, and this time he won - for a song that predates the movie by four years and was only included for purposes of commercial exploitation. When the film came out, Loesser found himself with a new pop hit. Two versions – one by Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark , the other by Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer – both got to Number Four. Frank Loesser lost a party piece and gained a standard: At the Academy Awards, it was sung by Mae West and Rock Hudson. A few years later, Ray Charles and Betty Carter nibbled the lower end of the pop chart. The only person who wasn't happy was Lynn Loesser: "her" song was now the world's.

Meanwhile, what happened to the brand new song that was supposed to be introduced in Neptune's Daughter ? You remember – "Slow Boat To China". Well, you can still hear it in the film, but only instrumentally – during a swimsuit fashion show. Esther Williams apparently recorded a vocal, but the studio nixed it on the grounds that the song appeared to be encouraging an "immoral liaison". It was left to Kay Kyser's big hit record to establish "Slow Boat" with the public.

Speaking of immorality, MGM's censors cut the wrong song. A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the US had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:


The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . .

Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colorado, in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colorado, in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was "Baby, It's Cold Outside," as introduced by Esther Williams in "Neptune's Daughter." Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11 to the brief Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt to the Islamic State marching across Syria and Iraq. Indeed, Qutb's view of the West is the merest extension of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" — America as the ultimate seducer, the Great Satan.

And so this last week's controversy represents a grand convergence of Islamic imperialism and Generation Snowflake, united by their fear of a harmless playful charming trifle.

Should I make like the snowflakes and sign on with Sayyid Qutb? Well, I'm a reasonable fellow, and I'd be willing to meet the Muslim Brotherhood chaps halfway on a lot of the peripheral stuff like beheadings, stonings, clitoridectomies and whatnot. But you'll have to pry "Baby, It's Cold Outside" from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. A world without "Baby, It's Cold Outside" would be very cold indeed.

https://www.steynonline.com/7630/baby-its-cold-outside


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JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1  seeder  JohnRussell    6 years ago

No religion on this seed please. No "war on Christmas" arguments that refer to religion. They will be removed. 

 
 
 
Buzz of the Orient
Professor Expert
1.1  Buzz of the Orient  replied to  JohnRussell @1    6 years ago

LOL.  You post a seed with religion:

"Should I make like the snowflakes and sign on with Sayyid Qutb? Well, I'm a reasonable fellow, and I'd be willing to meet the Muslim Brotherhood chaps halfway on a lot of the peripheral stuff like beheadings, stonings, clitoridectomies and whatnot."

And then you say "No religion on this seed please."

LOL

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1.1.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Buzz of the Orient @1.1    6 years ago

Its not about religion Buzz. If you make a comment about religion Im going to have it removed.

 
 
 
Buzz of the Orient
Professor Expert
1.1.2  Buzz of the Orient  replied to  JohnRussell @1.1.1    6 years ago

Okay, okay, you win.

 
 
 
KDMichigan
Junior Participates
1.2  KDMichigan  replied to  JohnRussell @1    6 years ago

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
2  seeder  JohnRussell    6 years ago

I was at a family holiday party last week and this song came up on the playlist. One of my twenty- something nieces brought up that it was being "banned" from some radio stations across the country because of the ME Too protesting.  That was the first I have heard of this , although I guess this protest has been chugging along for a couple years now. 

I think it's a great pop song, and one of the few that has completely separate singing parts for the man and the woman. I hope the radio stations don't get carried away with removing this song. I think the "argument" is pretty weak. 

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
2.1  Vic Eldred  replied to  JohnRussell @2    6 years ago
I hope the radio stations don't get carried away with removing this song. I think the "argument" is pretty weak. 

The "controversy" began in San Francisco (where else), where a radio station (KOIT) suddenly got a lot of mail about playing the song. The complaints claimed the song was about "date rape". That song won an Academy Award for best original song in 1950.  To suggest it seems to be about rape is incredible, but that's how over the top the left is. That same radio station let the people vote on allowing it to be played. Even in San Francisco the song won out hands down!

 
 
 
PJ
Masters Quiet
3  PJ    6 years ago

It would be totally over the top censorship if they ban this song.  

 
 
 
Tacos!
Professor Guide
5  Tacos!    6 years ago

OK this may surprise people, but I have been chafing at and complaining about this song for years. It has always made me uncomfortable.  I don't like the idea of pleading with a girl whether it's just to stay a little longer or jump in the sack. I think it reflects a basic disrespect for a woman's ability to decide for herself what she wants to do with a man. It's pretty arrogant to insist that if she just gives him a chance, he'll make it worth her while. Just feels like date rape. Always has for me. 

And one line is particularly disturbing:

(Say what's in this drink)

So, has she just been roofied? Will she be passing out in a minute?

If you don't agree with me, that's fine. I won't judge you for it. It's not a MeToo thing for me. I just see it more as coercion than seduction.

And besides, it's not even a song about Christmas! The only thing it has in common with Christmas is that it's cold. What are we holding onto this song for as a Christmas thing?

I wouldn't ever suggest it be censored, but I turn the channel when it comes on. And oh, by the way, for a song that isn't even about Christmas, it gets wayyy too much play this time of year.

 
 
 
Buzz of the Orient
Professor Expert
5.2  Buzz of the Orient  replied to  Tacos! @5    6 years ago
"So, has she just been roofied? Will she be passing out in a minute?"

But she didn't, did she. So why make up stories?  An alcoholic drink didn't need a "roofie" to calm a person's nerves - didn't everyone seek to "have a drink" when they were under stress - at least in the movies (Art imitating life)?  Everyone's got to stretch whatever they can into an "agenda" these days, don't they. 

 
 
 
Tacos!
Professor Guide
5.2.2  Tacos!  replied to  Buzz of the Orient @5.2    6 years ago
So why make up stories?

um, you know the whole song is a made up story, right?

You know how people can look at a painting or statue and have different interpretations? This is mine.

 
 
 
Buzz of the Orient
Professor Expert
5.2.3  Buzz of the Orient  replied to  Tacos! @5.2.2    6 years ago
"You know how people can look at a painting or statue and have different interpretations? This is mine."

Okay, I'll buy that.

 
 
 
Ender
Professor Principal
6  Ender    6 years ago

Guess I am out of the loop. I don't even know this song.

Even after listening to it, I don't ever remember hearing it. If I did, it never left an impression.

 
 
 
Buzz of the Orient
Professor Expert
6.1  Buzz of the Orient  replied to  Ender @6    6 years ago

LOL.  You're not old enough.

 
 
 
Ender
Professor Principal
6.1.1  Ender  replied to  Buzz of the Orient @6.1    6 years ago

Haha   I haven't heard that in a while.

 
 
 
KDMichigan
Junior Participates
8  KDMichigan    6 years ago

All I have to say is I have no feelings at all for Lady Gaga. But her singing this with Tony Bennett...

 
 
 
KDMichigan
Junior Participates
8.1  KDMichigan  replied to  KDMichigan @8    6 years ago

 
 
 
tomwcraig
Junior Silent
8.1.1  tomwcraig  replied to  KDMichigan @8.1    6 years ago

I'm sorry. but the best version is by Dean Martin:

 
 
 
charger 383
Professor Silent
9  charger 383    6 years ago

I like the song, part of the Christmas Season

 
 
 
Galen Marvin Ross
Sophomore Participates
10  Galen Marvin Ross    6 years ago

Here's another one, that I like but, it does suggest things, in the lyrics and, in the way it's sung,

 
 
 
tomwcraig
Junior Silent
11  tomwcraig    6 years ago

The song isn't about sex.  It isn't about dating.  What it is about is a certain situation after a date, when they went into his house or apartment to have a nightcap.  They are both heavily attracted to each other, hence the girl asking what was in the drink.  She was trying to figure out why she actually wanted to stay despite all of her reasons why she needed to go home.  He, on the other hand, is worried about her safety on a night where it is freezing and storming outside and she could slip, fall, and hurt herself at the least.  Yes, he does want more than her to just stay over and be safe, but as I said, they are both heavily attracted to each other.  He, unlike her, is not fighting the attraction.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
11.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  tomwcraig @11    6 years ago

The song is about flirtation. That is the way it was understood when it was written, and the daughter of the composer re-iterated this in a tv interview recently. She also said her father would blow his top (were he alive).  over the suggestion the song suggests date rape.

 
 
 
Split Personality
Professor Guide
11.1.1  Split Personality  replied to  JohnRussell @11.1    6 years ago

True that. One Feminists claims it for an anthem.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/drinking-smoking-carousing-why-baby-it’s-cold-outside-is-actually-a-feminist-anthem/ar-BBQNJtp?ocid=spartanntp

and the radio station that started this nonsense has backed off the ban.

A California radio station has reversed its decision to stop playing “Baby It's Cold Outside” over controversial lyrics in the age of the #MeToo movement after the overwhelming majority of listeners said they opposed the ban.

Peace jrSmiley_34_smiley_image.gif

 
 

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