A Pew Center report in 2014 said that nearly two-thirds of consistent conservatives and nearly half of consistent liberals say their close friends share their beliefs. police gone too far this time?” Everyone, as John Loesser said, can have their own opinion.Īnd America agrees with him-just not quite in the way he might intend. Meanwhile, Fox News segments ponder their song and wonder, “Have the P.C. It was enough to convince the couple to donate the song’s proceeds to the Sexual Assault Center of Minnesota, the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, and RAINN.
Liza and Lemanski have heard from sexual-assault survivors, mothers who used it to teach consent to their children, even a college a cappella group who sung it at their holiday concert. That just because there’s a new version, doesn’t mean the old version has to disappear. That would certainly be the easiest truce to the “Baby” war-that it’s O.K. It really wasn’t anything but that.”īut, he gets that “art that was written 70 years ago” is sometimes going to feel antiquated. “It was a flirtatious, wonderful, sexy number between people who like each other. No one is really the aggressor,” he says. On the one hand, he thinks the anti-Babyers are looking for things that aren’t there. By John Swope/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Even when the Chicago Tribune-a mainstream media publication if there ever was one- ran a piece about the couple, they got an avalanche of negative comments and hate e-mails.įrank Loesser playing on a grand piano, 1952. For every bit of praise-“The song is desperately in need of an update,” wrote Refinery29-there are scathing retorts (“I wish this was a fake news satirical story, but sadly, it’s true,” said conservative site Hot Air). “And you liberals wonder why Trump won,” reads one of the top comments on the YouTube version of Liza and Lemanski’s song. For a while there, it looked like “Baby” had its place in the pantheon-right up there on the mantle with “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” But then, things started to get messy. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers ranked it as the 22nd-most-played holiday song of all time. The rest was history for “Baby.” In the past 70 years, it’s been covered by everyone from Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan to Idina Menzel and Michael Bublé.
“So, even though it’s catchy and, when well, can be down right adorable, maybe its time for us to take ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ off the Christmas playlist.”
“Today, the song’s subtext finds itself at odds with basic notions of consent,” wrote The Washington Post in 2014.
Think pieces condemning the sexual politics of “Baby” have flooded the Internet every December for years now. had a 2015 parody featuring Kenan Thompson as, yikes, Bill Cosby. The new version by these Minnesota twentysomethings went viral a few weeks ago, but Liza and Lemanski are far from the first to point out what now seem like sinister vibes in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Key and Peele spoofed it in 2012, and in 2015, Funny or Die released an “ honest” performance of the holiday classic (which ended with the “mouse,” Casey Wilson, knocking the “wolf,” Scott Aukerman, out with a shovel and shouting, “This is a completely inappropriate song!”). The two recorded a new version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” with lyrics like “I really can’t stay/Baby I’m fine with that” and a LaCroix reference. That’s Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski speaking. On the original 1944 sheet music for “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” the singer’s names are listed as “wolf”-given lines like “Beautiful, what’s your hurry?”-and “mouse”-singer of “Say, what’s in this drink?” The song, by Tin Pan Alley legend Frank Loesser, is a holiday standard and an Academy Award winner.
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