Christmas is a time for communing with loved ones, counting your blessings, and, if you were a Louisville, Kentucky, radio station in 2018, protesting in favor of a divisive Christmas song by playing the track for two consecutive hours. After all, is there a better (or more memorable) way to get your point across than to make that point repeatedly for hours on end?
Fortunately for everyone involved, it is a Christmas song we’re talking about, so there were plenty of different cover versions to choose from during this two-hour marathon protest for one of the most hotly debated holiday tunes in recent history: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
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Why Some Radio Stations Began Banning The Divisive Christmas Song
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” has been a part of the secular Christmas canon since the late 1940s when the 1949 film Neptune’s Daughter helped popularize the 1944 composition by Frank Loesser. The songwriter behind the coquettish seasonal song is the same man who wrote other pop songs of the 1940s and ‘50s, including the equally flirtatious holiday song “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve” and other widely covered tunes like “Luck Be A Lady” and “If I Were A Bell.” Loesser’s songs, many of which were in musicals of the time, were campy and lighthearted, as most ‘40s pop music was.
But decades after the release of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” the online community began pointing out some, er, questionable lines in the will-they-won’t-they duet about a woman needing to leave a date and the man insisting she stays. Lines like, say, what’s in this drink, and I ought to say no, no, no, bore the brunt of the sharpest criticism centered around consensual relationships. Arguments for removing the song from the usual holiday rotation came to a head in the wake of the #MeToo movement, which marked a cultural shift away from normalized inappropriate behavior and, in this song especially, what many perceived to be romanticized coercion.
Some radio stations pulled the divisive Christmas song from their yearly playlists for good. Other radio stations dug their heels into the snow.
A Kentucky Station Responds With Two-Hour Marathon Protest
When societal shifts cause old traditions, behaviors, or even music to fall out of public favor, friction almost inevitably follows. The ubiquity of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is undeniable. For decades, the song was a cheeky conversation between two consenting adults engaging in a cozy game of cat and mouse. Sure, some lyrics can come across as creepy in the wrong context. But, some would argue, so could anything if you tried hard enough to make it seem that way. For those in this camp, the uproar around the divisive Christmas song was taking the #MeToo movement a step too far.
One of those people was Joe Fredele, program director for Louisville, Kentucky’s WAKY. “I’m not sure why it’s controversial,” he told CBS News in 2018. “We’ve played this song for years, you know. This song is older than WAKY is. It’s almost 70 years old. This song is not about [inappropriate or non-consensual relations]. All it is is a dialogue between a man and a woman, and at the end of the song, you hear them harmonize together. So, they’re agreeing, basically.”
In protest of the Christmas song’s controversy, the radio station opted to play different versions of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for two straight hours, 8 am to 10 am, on a Saturday morning in December 2018. The marathon protest might not have changed the public discourse about the divisive holiday duet, but it certainly managed to get the decades-old song stuck in plenty of people’s heads around the Louisville listening area.
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