Radio station defies chilly reception for 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' by playing it on repeat for two hours straight
A Kentucky radio station has decided to show its support for the newly controversial song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” by playing it on repeat for two hours.
On Dec. 16, Louisville’s WAKY-FM played five different versions on loop from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. “We just wanted a fun way to say, ‘Hey, don’t pick on the song!’” the oldies station’s program director, Joe Fedele, tells Yahoo Lifestyle.
The song has faced controversy in the past two winters, 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?” — probably the reason why some supporters of the #MeToo movement have expressed interest in banning the song.
This year, several radio stations have pulled the tune, but WAKY-FM decided to take the opposite tack.
“We had heard that there were some radio stations banning the song, and we were curious about it, because we’d been playing the song for years and years and years, with not a word about anything wrong with it,” Fedele tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “And so we heard that somebody had connected it with the #MeToo movement and partner abuse and sexual harassment. And we just figured, the song isn’t anywhere close to that. So we wanted to kind of express our support for it.”
The radio station announced its support of the song on Facebook on Saturday.
And it posted a reminder Sunday morning.
Most of the responses on Facebook have been positive.
Offline, the response has been mixed. “I spoke to a social worker yesterday who disagreed with us playing it, and that was fine; we had a good conversation and just sort of agreed to disagree at the end,” Fedele shares with Yahoo Lifestyle. “But for the most part, people have been very positive about it and think maybe things are going too far in terms of people being politically correct, and we need to have a little more balance to it, I guess.”
Fedele consulted a female colleague in taking the decision, in addition to other DJs at the station. “I also spoke to our general manager René Bell, and she’s a pretty tough but fair-minded woman, and she was like, ‘I see nothing wrong with this song,’” he notes. “So we talked about it and said, ‘Why don’t we go ahead and do it?’”
The station isn’t alone. Another Louisville station, WVEZ-FM — known as “Louisville’s Original Christmas Music Station” — hasn’t stopped playing four different versions of the ditty.
San Francisco station 96.5 KOIT removed the song from its rotation on Dec. 4 — but also invited listeners to weigh in on the change on a poll on its website on the same day.
“KOIT’s listeners have spoken, and the overwhelming message is they do want to hear ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ on our station, as they have throughout the years,” the station said in a statement the following week. “More than seven out of every 10 listeners who responded said, although some lyrics of the song may reflect a different era and a different sensibility than today, still they love the tradition and history of the song, and want to hear it as part of their holiday season,” the statement said. “At KOIT, we always listen carefully when our listeners take time to comment. In this case, it was very obvious what they wanted us to do.”
A Canadian station followed suit. CBC Music, which operates in Toronto online and on 94.1 FM, explained in a Dec. 11 blog post that it had removed the popular song “in recognition of the differing opinions pertaining to the lyrics.” However, it began to change its tune once listeners expressed disappointment in that decision. “Because we value our audience input, which was overwhelmingly to include the song, we have put it back on the two playlists where it had been removed,” the corporation’s head of public affairs, Chuck Thompson, said in a statement.
WAKY isn’t trying to be political. “The station has been around for a long time, but we just try to be fun. If everyone wants to be serious, that’s their business, but we just want to have fun. We don’t want to be political,” Fedele states.
In fact, it’s trying to do the very opposite. “We want to make it lighter,” he says. “So many people get so uptight about things nowadays, it’s almost like they’re trying to be offended. And we want to say: Let’s accept each other. If we have different opinions that’s OK, we can still get along.”
In defense of the song, Fedele broke down the lyrics. “We just thought it was a romantic song about a romance that’s just getting started,” he explains. “If you listen to the song, the woman starts out the song. As she goes through the song, she says, ‘This evening has really been grand.’ You don’t say that to somebody that’s disrespecting you,” Fedele points out. “And she also says, not that there’s anything wrong with him, but she was talking about fearing her family would find out and be all up in arms over it — that her reputation would be besmirched.”
Fedele added that the song has a happy ending. “By the end of the song, she’s singing harmony with him and she’s also singing, ‘Baby, it’s cold outside,’ so she must agree with him,” he reasons. “The idea of somebody forcing it, I just don’t think that’s correct.”
Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:
#MeToo Movement: Jennifer Lawrence slams Harvey Weinstein for claiming they had sexual relations
Radio station stops playing ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ because ‘it’s no longer appropriate’
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