Song of the day for December 16, 2023
Today’s song is a cover version of Baby It’s Cold Outside, by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lady Gaga from Lady Gaga & The Muppets’ Holiday Spectacular.
I chose this song because on this date in 2018 some supporters of the #MeToo movement expressed an interest in banning the song ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside,’ a Kentucky radio station decided to show its support for the newly controversial song by playing it on repeat for two hours. The song had faced controversy as people began to scrutinize the situation portrayed in the lyrics. Written in 1944, it describes the exchange between a man and a woman, as the woman expresses her desire to get home and the man tries to persuade her to stay. At one point, the woman even asks, “What’s in this drink?”
In 1944, Frank Loesser wrote “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” to sing with his wife, Lynn Garland, at their housewarming party in New York City at the Navarro Hotel. They sang the song to indicate to guests that it was time to leave. Garland has written that after the first performance, “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.” In 1948, after years of performing the song, Loesser sold it to MGM for the 1949 romantic comedy Neptune’s Daughter. Garland was furious: “I felt as betrayed as if I’d caught him in bed with another woman.”
According to Esther Williams, the producers of Neptune’s Daughter had planned to use a different Loesser song, “(I’d Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China”, but studio censors thought it was too suggestive and replaced it with “Baby.”
The song won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Original Song.
