Sophie Milman, an award-winning jazz musician, says she thinks the song was meant to be a 'playful repartee' between the two singers. The man's refusal to accept the woman's "No" for an answer struck many modern listeners as "coercive and problematic," as Lydia Liza, 25-year-old singer-songwriter from Minnesota, sees it. It became an instant hit, even winning an Academy Award in 1950.Īt first glance, the premise of the song is simple enough: a call-and-answer duet between a man and a woman, where he implores her to stay at his place as she demurs that she should leave. Loesser sold the song to MGM to use in the film Neptune's Daughter, starring Esther Williams. A feminist song in disguise?īaby, it's Cold Outside began its life in 1944, when songwriter Frank Loesser, who also penned the Broadway hit musical Guys and Dolls wrote it to perform with his wife Lynn at parties. But as the debate continues deeper into December, some are pointing to the scrutiny of the song as a harbinger of things to come for other pop compositions that may offend the modern ear (hint: Mick Jagger might have reasons to be nervous).
Some voices are coming forward to defend the song, saying it had a proto-feminist message for its time, while others say it should be tossed. The 74-year-old tune about a man coaxing his date to stay despite her professed wish to leave is now being silenced on many radio stations (including two streams of CBC Music), but the debate about its merits, and the repercussions of the decision to shelve it, is still being aired. ‘If you don’t like the original, don’t listen to it’, he yelled at Good Morning Britain viewers, advice which can be just as easily applied to the new John and Kelly version.Baby, it's Cold Outside is a song that lends itself to many incarnations - and just as many interpretations. 'Kim Jong Un would have felt at home in the 1990s nightclub scene'Īs a rule, anything which makes arch-snowflake Piers Morgan angry enough to spit out his vegan sausage roll is fine with me.In the new version, when Kelly sings, ‘I’ve got to go away’, John immediately respects her decision with the swift response, ‘I can call you a ride’.įrom that you’d imagine it would be a very short song, but John and Kelly manage to string it out for the original three-minutes-something, also including the refrain, ‘your body, your choice’. Kelly Clarkson and John Legend have joined forces on a reimagined version of the oft-criticized Christmas classic, Baby It's Cold OutsideĪnyway, this year the row has got particularly heated, after John Legend and Kelly Clarkson re-imagined the song, taking out the old controversial lyrics and adding new controversial ones. On my God, it’s an analogy of Brexit! Urgh, is nothing safe? ‘I really can’t stay’ sings the Mouse, making excuses to leave, while the Wolf urges her to remain, pointing out, ‘it’s cold outside’. The song itself shouldn’t need any explanation, but it’s a call and response duet between a man (labelled ‘the Wolf’) and a woman (‘the Mouse’), at the end of a date.
I imagine the composer Frank Loesser would have been horrified by that reaction when he wrote it in 1944 to sing at parties with his wife Lynn Garland – although lyrics intended to be playful jokes back then, (‘say, what’s in this drink’, for example), sound a bit creepy in 2019. The song has been accused of being a ‘lighthearted portrayal of sexual coercion’, and worse – that it is suggestive of sexual harassment or even date rape. well, depending on who’s singing it.īefore this week, the fallout surrounding this not particularly festive classic had completely passed me by.īut it seems to have become an annual clickbait controversy. I don’t see any need to change the lyrics to the winter-warming Christmas(ish) duet Baby, It’s Cold Outside.
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