The madness of the most problematic number one in music history
Courting controversy and rubbing up against the limits of liberation are central tenets of some of our favourite music genres. However, the realm where you don’t expect it is the savoury tradition of the Christmas single. Nevertheless, there is one song that has entered that wholesome cannon about the seedy sin of date rape. Year on year this track is innocently regurgitated – unnoticed by some – and it is a madness that continues to baffle.
When Frank Loesser wrote ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ back in 1944, he intended as a joke that was never going to leave the party where it was told. Alongside his wife, Lynn, the couple would duet this dubious tune to the delight of their guests and then get on with the evening after a bit of a risqué knees-up. The song went down a storm with guests howling at the lewd humour and made their housewarming party a bash for the ages.
The next time they were at a gathering they were urged to perform it again. “It was something that songwriters did in those days,” their son John told The Palm Beach Post. “If you were invited to a party, you were expected to sing for your supper. Oscar Levant, Roger Edens, Harry Warren – they all did it. But the song was a private social piece for parties. My mother just loved both the song and the fact that it was hers. And it kept them in champagne and caviar.”
They wanted it under wraps for good reason it was an amusing parlour piece among friends, but it was rather troublesome to pipe out on the radio. The only problem was, they had friends in high places and soon an MGM representative thought that it might bring the same nettlesome merriment to the big screen. He made Frank an offer and much to the chagrin of Lynn, he accepted. Their song was set to be featured in the film Neptune’s Daughter.
And strangely, this is what is so weird about this tale. Raising an eyebrow at the date rape lyrics shrouded in a soft melody is not some retrospective ridicule of a bygone era—the track began life as a joke and in the film that premise was subverted even further in order to highlight the postmodernist twist of a sweet-sounding jazz tune with darkly sinister lyrics.
Neptune’s Daughter depicted this perfectly by swapping the sexes at one point in the film. The track gets a second run out, and this time a young lady pleads with an elderly gentleman to stay and attempts to steal his coat to prevent him from returning home to his family. In the act of doing so gulps ring out resoundingly as the shuddering sexual misconduct rings out like a gag from a musical version of The Office.
The darkest moment in the predatory high jinks is the implication of a spiked drink with the insidious line, “Say, what’s in that drink?” However, there are also subtle jibes at the deluded male gaze with lines like, “What’s the sense of hurting my pride?” The only way it could be clearer is f the deleted verses of ‘Did I just see you locking that door?’ and ‘Just sniff this chloroform and lie on the floor’ were included.
However, despite it being a dodgy joke about male predation pushing the boundaries of consent, the aforementioned postmodernist twist of playing it straight with a sweet, swinging jazz melody muddied the picture. Its inherent catchiness meant that the romantic hook glossed over the gritty reality of the story at play as soon as it was taken out of a comic context and hit the radio in a string of covers as a straightforward pop song.
And in this guise, it became a Christmas tradition. Now, for almost it has been presented as a mistletoe anthem and the darkness behind it has often been ignored. And perhaps the biggest paradigm of this misreading is that it also doesn’t even mention Christmas once. Yet again, that is down to the key in which it is written proving that the right surface can twist any subtext.
