Mine’s funnier.
I actually caught a discussion on the subject on Dutch national radio. I thought it would be dismissed quickly as “crazy American prudishness”, but 2 out of 3 women on the panel actually supported the station’s line of thought (although not so much the ban). The third one, an older lady, didn’t waste too much words on it but just labeled the whole thing as ‘ridiculous’.
As for me:
- As a musician and music lover, this is a great song from every possible angle. Banning art is always a bad thing.
- As a rationalist, get over it and find something useful to do.
- As a European, crazy American prudishness.
- As a man, today’s women need to grow a pair
- As an optimist, if this makes the news then the rest of the world must be in pretty good shape
Do you hear it in a Bad Santa sort of way?!
I’m now contemplating starting a campaign to claim that Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is about pedophilia. If I can get that sucker banned, my holiday observances will be greatly improved.
Somebody wake up Dr. Frankenstein. He needs to dig up Frank Loesser, reanimate him, and tell him that he has to rewrite those lyrics.
That’s going a bit too far, although I will concede that there was no need for anyone to attempt it after Eartha was finished with it.
You think THAT’s creepy? Get a load of the Starlighters!
As the song was originally written as a party piece for Loesser and his wife, he used to joke that heis part meant he was the “evil of two Loessers”. Which probably has more to do with Loesser refusing to let go of a good line rather than it being a sign of rapiness in the song.
And I admit that I actually like Madonna’s version of “Santa Baby”.
Veering way off topic, but for some reason what comes to mind is something like:
*
It’s frightfully kind of you, Wolf, but no,
I’m having tea with a Gruffalo.*
Let me pour some cold water on you: Knee-jerk recreational outrage will always place over gritty real world problems in the news.
Did the station actually cause the fanfare? Or did they just circulate an internal memo telling people not to play it that got leaked and taken up as a new front in the culture war?
Deano is fabu, and his is the best version.
Growing up in an uptight neighborhood of immigrants who wore their religion like a shield, and had to put on a persona of purity, the woman in the song is playing the role of being pure, and the song just comes through as nothing but the wriggling around that comes up when a woman kinda shoulda be hitting the road, based on some big or even local social norm, which was even worse decades ago, and against a background that drives for even more purity… well… It’s a wonder anyone got laid ‘back then.’
This same woman might get pregnant and resort to having her family hide her pregnant self like a Jew from the Nazis (the neighbors and family) and then watch her child be raised by her aunt, who will raise the woman’s baby as the Aunt’s own child, some distance close enough and far enough, and the mother – the woman who stayed and put on a show so others didn’t think less of her – will suffer a never-ending pain as she is her own child’s aunt now. This is how much lunacy went on (still does).
Anyway… I always felt the song was nothing more than artistic version of the contortions people had to go through to make others approve or at least not slap a whore label on them. The woman is just doing the proverbial dance that needed to be done. Sometimes, the ‘dance’ was enough to even make the woman’s conscience less of a bitch to deal with.
Jeesh. Date rape? GTFO. Almost all SJWs miss a major point that can be made, IF THE SONG COULD BE HEARD, because that dance still exists. It still exists.
.
There’s still that pressure from society, in some ways it’s expanded. Especially with social media where someone can be effectively libeled anonymously and instantly. But in other ways it’s lessened. There’s less judgment about cohabitating(living in sin) or hooking up or having friends with benefits. Fetishes and kinks are openly discussed and even celebrated in certain ways(50 Shades of Gray anyone?). There’s less social opprobrium now than at almost any other time in history. Which makes it weirder to me that the best data we have shows there’s a sex recession among young people. I’ve seen it among my own children, they’re less active than even I was at their age, and I wasn’t exactly Casanova.
The explosion of estrogen-mimicing plastics in our lives may be as big a problem in disrupting our endocrine systems and decreasing sex drives(plummeting birth rates threaten to virtually wipe out a number of countries) and increasing obesity as high environmental lead rates were for past generations. High environmental lead rates led to increased criminal behavior and lower academic achievement for a generation of Americans before leaded gasoline was banned. We are just starting to get an idea of how this could be affecting us.
Anyway, back to the song. I didn’t see any mention of any actual complaints from people. Just various station staff saying what they think someone else may think and taking action based on that imagined feeling. I think this is a poor way to make policy. In cases of true injustice it’s rarely difficult to find someone to give voice to the sentiment. There was no need to look around at the Jim Crow South and think “I wonder if anyone resents this segregation?” There were plenty of people, saying loud and clear, that they resented the segregation.
That’s really the problem I have with this kind of thing. Silence doesn’t infer dissent.
Enjoy,
Steven
The radio station isn’t silencing anyone or preventing people from listening to what they want to listen to. It is taking a moral stance on what messages it wants to participate in.
In that context, the opinions of the station managers and staff are very important. And their decision to take a song off it’s okaylist is relevant to an ongoing cultural discussion about the song.
This is what free speech is all about—letting each speaker make a choice. Free speech doesn’t mean that a radio station must never make any judgments about songs it plays or wait for someone else to complain before removing a song from its list.
Flanders and Swann’s “Madeira, M’Dear” hasn’t dated well, either, being very explicitly about date rape:
Poor Ron…
No it’s not. This is a publicity stunt.
For clarification, Lady Gaga makes a fine Wolf, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the Mouse. Okay, they both had to transpose an octave, but it works that way. Just listen to the Mouse’s lyrics and tell us the resistance is genuine.
I’d accept banning “The Little Drummer Boy” if it meant keeping “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”. I’d ban it anyway, though, so maybe that doesn’t count.
Cite?
We’re discussing it, aren’t we? Win!