Complex Numbers

Cold Inside

Another year, another shitstorm about holiday songs.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-46425160

Baby, It's Cold Outside is one of those Christmas songs that's about as traditional as mince pies.

But an American radio station's decision to pull it from playlists because it's seen as unsuitable in the #MeToo era has reignited a debate about the song, and raised questions about other potentially questionable Christmas classics.

First of all, let me state outright that my life would not be lessened in any way if I never heard another holiday song. It would, in fact, be improved. Ideally, I would never step into a store and be bombarded with "White Christmas" or "Santa Claus is Comin' To Town" or especially "I'll be Home for Christmas."

There are a few that I can tolerate, but for the most part, if I never had to hear another Christmas song, I'd be happy. Or at least a little less depressed, which for me amounts to the same thing.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, I'm going to talk about the controversial songs.

What a lot of people miss when consuming media - be it audio, video, or whatever - is historical context. The platitude about people who don't learn from history being doomed to repeat it holds true here.

Things were different in the past. That's why we call it the past. Lots of things that were created in the past couldn't be created today, not in the same way. Blazing Saddles comes to mind. That movie was a product of the 1970s just as sure as Watergate and disco were. Movies like that one were created to shine a spotlight on the stupid attitudes of the time, and played a role in eliminating them. Once these attitudes became obsolete, a lot of the context of the movie was lost. If you don't know what race relations were like in the 70s, you'll miss a lot of the subtext.

As writers, one of the greatest things we can hope for is that something that we write - be it a story or a song or whatever - helps to change things. In the process, often the writer's work becomes obsolete. People later will miss the point, unless they understand the historical context. It's a bit like doctors working to eradicate disease - once it's eradicated, people in the future will start to wonder what all the fuss was about. Hence you get some of the most egregious types of reactionary in the present, like anti-vaxxers. Lacking the historical context of polio outbreaks and measles epidemics, they just don't understand why people make a big deal out of vaccination.

The song in question - and make no mistake, I think it's just as crap as any other "holiday" song - was a product of its time, and a wish for things to be different. Well, now things are different. We're closer to social equality than ever before. We're open to different expressions of gender identity. Things that once were forbidden are now commonplace - and that's not a bad thing.

But if we forget where we came from, the road that took us to this place where we are, we risk going back to it. You can try to make this a generational thing - I'm going to save my rant about "generations" for another entry, as this one's going on long enough - but it's not so much about generations as it is about ignoring history. Yes, things were worse in many ways in the 40s. But to know exactly how they were different can only highlight how far we've come, and how far we still need to go.

And I think the bigger problem is that once-respected news organizations like the BBC are quoting Twatter. If anything needs to go away, it's not old Christmas songs; it's shallow social media.

Let's work on that one, shall we?

I'll wrap this up with one of the few holiday songs I can stand: