By Timothy T. Tater, Editor & Chief Spud
The Sweet Potato
There are bad songs. There are terrible songs. And then there’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a musical composition so profoundly stupid that it managed to achieve something remarkable: complete cultural invisibility until the moment everyone decided to argue about it.
I had lived a full, rich life without ever knowing this song existed. Not once did I hear it at a party and think, “What’s this delightful duet?” Not once did I find myself humming it in the shower. It was as if the universe had done me the courtesy of filing it under “Songs That Sound Like Elevator Music Had a Stroke.”
But then came the Great Discourse of 2018, when the Cancel Police—armed with think pieces and righteous fury—decided this obscure little ditty from 1944 was Public Enemy Number One. Suddenly, my blissful ignorance was shattered. Radio stations were “banning” it. Twitter was ablaze. Everyone had an opinion about a song that, prior to this moment, had been gathering dust in the cultural attic next to “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”
Let me be clear: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is aggressively dumb. The premise—if we can even call it that—is that a woman wants to leave, and a man keeps pointing out meteorological conditions. That’s it. That’s the entire song. It’s like someone tried to write a romantic comedy but only got as far as checking the Weather Channel.
“I really can’t stay,” she says, probably eyeing the door and wondering if she can make a run for it.
“But baby, it’s cold outside,” he responds, as if he’s just delivered the most devastating argument in the history of rhetoric. Aristotle is rolling in his grave. Cicero is weeping.
The song continues in this vein for what feels like seventeen hours but is actually only about three minutes. She mentions her mother will worry. He SHOULD have said, “Hey, why don’t you call her and let her know where you are?” Instead, he mentions… the cold again. She says she should go. He says—and I’m paraphrasing here—”Have you noticed the temperature?” It’s less seduction and more a man who really wants to talk about the weather forecast.
The melody itself sounds like what would happen if champagne bubbles could be mildly irritating. It prances along with the casual confidence of something that thinks it’s charming when it’s actually just beige. Frank Loesser, the composer, probably wrote this between lunch and dinner on a Tuesday, thought “Eh, good enough,” and then went on to write actually good songs, leaving this one to fade into deserved obscurity.
But here’s the thing: the Cancel Police rescued this song from its rightful grave. They took a forgettable relic that was quietly dying in department store sound systems and gave it immortality through controversy. They made it important. They held it up as a symbol of something, anything, thereby ensuring that future generations would have to know it exists.
Before the hullabaloo, if you’d asked me about “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” I would have assumed you were describing a rejected title for a Jack London novel. Now? Now I have opinions. Now I’ve heard it dozens of times. Now it’s stuck in my head like a piece of terrible cultural trivia I can never unlearn.
The song is dumb because it’s repetitive. It’s dumb because the entire conflict could be resolved with “Okay, I’ll call you a cab” or “Let me lend you my warmer coat.” It’s dumb because somehow this man thinks meteorology is seductive. “The precipitation levels are quite high, if you know what I mean.” No. Nobody knows what you mean.
But mostly it’s dumb because it’s boring. There’s no there there. It’s the musical equivalent of small talk—pleasant enough if you’re not really listening, unbearable if you pay attention.
And yet, thanks to the moral panic of 2018, this song now has a legacy. It has been debated, dissected, defended, and denounced. Think pieces have been written. Radio programmers have made executive decisions. Someone, somewhere, probably wrote their thesis about it. And here I am, writing about it, too!
All for a song that should have quietly faded away like a snowflake in the spring, forgotten and unmourned, leaving us all in peace.
Instead, I now know every word. The melody haunts my dreams. And I have the Cancel Police to thank for introducing me to perhaps the most aggressively mediocre piece of music ever to inspire a national conversation.
So thank you, internet outrage machine, for taking something dumb and making it immortal. Nothing says “we’ve run out of actual problems” quite like turning a forgotten song about weather conditions into a cultural battleground.
Baby, it was cold outside. Now it’s just exhausting in here.
