Banished
Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
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09/01/21 • 27 min
Is there value in reading the classics at a time when they are increasingly viewed as tools of oppression and white supremacy? Do they speak to non-white students? Dr. Anika Prather, founder and principal of the Living Water School in Maryland and lecturer at Howard University in DC talks to Amna Khalid about the deep history of the significance of classics for Black Americans.
Click here for the full-length, subscriber-only interview.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe
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11/03/21 • 24 min
If you’ve been listening to Banished, you’ll recall that in just a few short months we’ve talked about attempts to abolish artwork, to repudiate literature and even to eliminate entire curricula throughout the United States. But you may wonder, as I sometimes still do, why me? Why am I, Amna Khalid, pulled toward these topics, compelled by what we casually call “cancel culture”?
And so, dear listeners, it feels like the right time to step back — to give you a sense of who I am and why I am deeply disturbed by the censorship and intolerance now thriving in the West. For this week’s episode, I will read aloud from a letter that I wrote earlier this year, to a loved one with whom I grew up in Pakistan. I hope that I leave you with a better understanding of why this show, why Banished and why me.
Mani,
My darling, darling Mani. What a ways the two of us have come. From the long, lazy days of Ammi’s home-cooked meals and family chatter, with all of us huddled together on her bed in Islamabad, to where we are now: you in the endless grey that runs through your years in Britain, now visible in the hairs on your face; and I enduring my tenth Minnesota winter.
We’ve taken to our new homes — quite seamlessly and effortlessly for the most part. You’ve internalized the sorry-reflex of the Brits and I, as you point out every chance you get, have inadvertently started mimicking the rhotic accent of the Midwest that grates on you so much. And though we never dare to speak of the oceans of losses that we have buried deep within us, you and I both know there is much that we have left behind. The dewy mornings of fall, the warmth of the winter sun, the oppressive dry heat of the summer months and the intensity of the monsoon rains punctuated by days of stifling humidity that would only let up with the next downpour — and the cycle would begin once again.
But that was not the suffocation that you and I ran away from. Our escape, if you will, was from a different kind of claustrophobia. You being gay and unable to live freely in your fullness and write in ways that challenged reigning orthodoxies; and me — then a young woman with too many ideas, hungry for intellectual stimulation, challenging all norms and limitations. Flamboyant and outspoken, we flirted with the idea of crossing the line of what was acceptable, but only in our small social circles of other misfits like you and me.
For me, the closing in of the walls came into focus for the first time that fateful evening in February 1989. I remember we could hear the mob outside the American Cultural Center which was miles away from our house. You turned on the tv and we watched it happen — the riots protesting Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The streets were teaming with thousands of zealots after Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Rushdie — the atmosphere was chilling. I was only 10 then but the gravity of the situation wasn’t lost on me. In the following months we sat night after night watching riots ripple across the globe, for Rushdie had committed blasphemy — (certain) Muslims were offended and their offense was translating into terror and violence.
It was only in the wake of the Rushdie affair that I fully came to appreciate the expansiveness of the notion of blasphemy and the legal infrastructure within Pakistan that gave it teeth. I started reading the newspaper and, of course, it was all too apparent for anyone to see, even to a ten year old, how these blasphemy laws — perverted in their very criminalization of speech to begin with — became a tool for repressing and dispossessing non-muslims. How these developments gave license to the outright targeting of minority groups hit home for me a year later when my friend Asha’s neighbor, an Ahmadi, was shot in his own driveway by a group of vigilantes. As I cast my mind back I can see my dumbstruck eleven-year-old self, holding Asha’s hand in school the next day -- both of us terror-stricken as she recounted how she and her father heard the shots, ran out and then helped load her neighbor’s bleeding body in their car only to have him declared dead when they got to the hospita...
02/08/25 • 17 min
Our friend and colleague Stony Brook sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has a new book out. And it’s a tour-de-force. We Have Never Been Woke is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the economic, political and cultural divides between the haves and the have-nots in the United States. We were delighted to host Musa for a book talk on the Carleton campus last month. He spoke with Amna in front a packed house. This is episode 2. Episode 1 is available here.
Show Notes
On the limitations of diversity training, see this piece from Musa, “Diversity is Important. Diversity-Related Training is Terrible.” Also see this piece we wrote in Inside Higher Ed, “Don’t Mistake Training for Education.” And this short, animated explainer video we made, “Training is Performative. Education is Transformative”
Georgetown philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò wrote the book on elite capture; here’s a précis in the Boston Review. And this piece by Táíwò, published in The Philosopher, is also worth reading: “Being-In-The-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference”
Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites by Mitchell Stevens is arguably the best book ever written on how the many advantages of the rich and well-off accumulate in the race to get into the most prestigious schools
On the incentives for students of color to highlight their trauma in college admissions essays, this NYT piece is excellent, “When I Applied to College, I Didn’t Want to ‘Sell My Pain.’” On “racial gamification” in college admissions, see Tyler Austin Harper, “I Teach at an Elite College. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gaming of Admissions”
College essays are more strongly correlated with social class than SAT scores. See this journal article by A.J. Alvero et al.
On the question of whether college admissions tests drive or reflect social inequalities, see this Banished episode (“Should More Colleges Drop the SAT and ACT?”) and this article in Inside Higher Ed (“Tests are not the source of inequities in American society”)
On the test-optional debate, see this article from the New York Times, this study from Dartmouth College and these comments from the MIT Dean of Admissions
Bertrand Cooper, “Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?” (Curren...
The Evolution of 'Woke'
Banished
08/18/21 • 29 min
What does it mean to be woke? Has the word problematic become problematic? Lexicon Valley’s John McWhorter talks to Amna Khalid about the fraught vocabulary of modern censorship.
FULL TRANSCRIPT *
AMNA KHALID: From Booksmart Studios, this is Banished. And I’m Amna Khalid.
NEWSCASTER: Republicans are always denouncing so-called “cancel culture.”
BBC GUEST 1: I think that nobody should lose their job because of what they believe in. I think that’s the issue—BBC GUEST 2: —but that’s what “cancel culture” is!
POLITICIAN: “Cancel culture” is eroding the very foundation of who we are as an American people.
NEWSCASTER 1: He’s woke.NEWSCASTER 2: I’m woke.NEWSCASTER 3: Now you’re woke but you’re like me woke!NEWSCASTER 2: I’m woke to the woke.
FOX NEWS GUEST: So we’re woke, and we have to say woke.NEWSCASTER: Wait, so we’re both woke? You and I are both woke?FOX NEWS GUEST: Yeah, I think we’re woke!NEWSCASTER: Who’s the woker of the two, would you say?
AK: “Woke” and “cancel culture” are now two terms that are now so much a part of our consciousness, that it feels like they’ve been around forever. But the reality is that they exploded only a few years ago. Like many of our most fraught cultural terms, they evolved over time, jumping from one community to another, shifting slightly in meaning or nuance. Along the way, they get weaponized, fall in and out of favor and even get canceled themselves — in other words, they are linguistically fascinating.
Who better to dig into the lexicon of Banished, than John McWhorter, the host of Lexicon Valley here on Booksmart Studios, and an esteemed professor of linguistics at Columbia University. If you’ve never heard his show, it’s an endlessly entertaining deep-dive into everything that makes language so enthralling. I started our conversation by asking him about the word woke, which I first heard in hip-hop lyrics.
JOHN McWHORTER: Well, woke actually goes back further than many people would think. It's actually first documented in the early 60s and it was a Black slang. What it meant was politically aware of certain realities that operate largely below the surface, but have a determinative effect on, for example, the Black American condition. And so you might think, if you were you or me, that woke is about 10 years old. But actually people were saying it on the Black street long before that. It did not leave the Black street. Then, in roughly the 2000-teens, it jumped the rails and started being used by a certain kind of politically aware white person on the left. And what it meant at first in the general culture was somebody who understands certain basic leftist analysises of the world. What it really was, was a substitute for a term that had worn out. It replaced politically correct, which, if you're just old enough now, you can remember was used without irony back in the late 70s and early 80s. And what it meant was that you have a basic understanding of liberal/leftist realities. Then it became PC. PCstarted being used as a slur to ridicule the kind of person who used that kind of ideology as a bludgeon in a smug kind of way. And so you couldn't say politically correct without making somebody laugh by, say, 2010. Really, you couldn't do it by about 1990. And so woke replaced that. As recently as 2018, I was on a TV show—
STEPHEN COLBERT (crowd cheering): My next guest tonight is a professor at Columbia University, who hosts one of my favorite podcasts.
JM: —talking about how woke was taking on a certain pejorative flavor.
JM ON COLBERT: When I learned it, it was still just the coolest thing: You are woke to the complexities of society and how injustice really happens. It was cool — it smelled like, roughly, marijuana and lavender. It was that kind of word. And about two seconds later, a certain kind of person started sneering: Oh, is that person woke?People from a certain side of the political spectrum are throwing at other people the idea being that you’re a smug person who thinks that your views are the ones that come from on high. That has happened during the time, roughly, that a certain person has become president, and about six months before that. I’ve found it fascinating. Woke will be all but unusable in ten years.
JM: Now, I would say that it has it. It's 2021, woke is now a word that is very much in quotati...
Alice Walker Has Been Cancelled
Banished
08/04/21 • 23 min
We are approaching the 40th anniversary of The Color Purple, a novel that garnered critical acclaim, won Alice Walker the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and brought her sudden literary scrutiny. Both the book and its subsequent feature film adaptation elicited a flurry of criticism, frequently from within the Black community.
Accused of reinforcing stereotypes of Black men as inherently violent, Walker was viewed by some as a race traitor. And for reasons that include depictions of rape, incest, homosexuality, violence and explicit language, The Color Purple has consistently remained on the American Library Association’s list of frequently challenged and banned books over the years.
Host Amna Khalid speaks with Ms. Walker about what it’s been like to experience a kind of “cancellation” repeatedly throughout her career.
* FULL TRANSCRIPT *
AMNA KHALID: We’re approaching the 40th anniversary of The Color Purple, the novel that earned Alice Walker the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, making her the first Black woman to receive the award. Shortly after, it was adapted into a feature film by Steven Spielberg, which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and 4 Golden Globes. The success of the book and then the film arguably made Alice Walker a household name.
And yet it also opened her up to some of the harshest criticism of her career. For her use of a Black dialect, her portrayal of Black men and her depiction of same-sex love between women, Walker was excoriated from within the Black community. Many said she was trading in racist stereotypes of Black men as violent rapists. Ishmael Reed, an African American and another giant in the literary world, was incensed, almost personally offended, by Walker’s rendering of Black men in the novel:
REED: You look at The Color Purple, you would think that the incest and all the people committing incest and committing rape are Black men. This is not true. Alice Walker said Black men are evil. She said they’re more evil than White men because White men are aware of their evil.
AK: When the film was released in 1985, the Coalition Against Black Exploitation protested outside the premier in Los Angeles. Vernon Jarrett, an African American columnist for the Chicago Sun Times, was one of many who were critical of the movie’s portrayal of Black men:
JARRETT: If it had been a story of Israel, would the Jews have permitted a movie to be made where every single male character was either a rapist, an incest perpetrator, a beast, or even dumb?
AK: The fact that Walker had allowed Spielberg — a White, Jewish man — to adapt the novel for the big screen led many to view her as a race traitor. Here, speaking at the time, is Louis Farrakhan, Leader of the Nation of Islam:
FARRAKHAN: He uses her, Whoopi Goldberg. She plays her part so well — I’m telling you — she may win an Oscar for that role. But not just because of her acting ability; but she wins an Oscar in the eyes of White folk because she aids in proving the point that the Black man is a dog. And as long as the Black man remains a dog, you cannot rise, therefore he cannot fall: The Color Purple.
AK: Joining us now to discuss censorship, cancelation and the relationship between society and the artist is the author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker. Ms. Walker, thank you so much for your time.
ALICE WALKER: Absolutely.
AK: The Color Purple and the response that you received to both the book and then the movie and the musical in many ways presaged for us the current moment that we're in and the kind of politics around cultural representation, around art and the role of art, and also around who gets to speak and who gets to tell the story, who does it belong to. And I cannot think of a better person to reflect on our moment today, when everyone is being canceled left, right and center, because there is this objection to how they're presenting things, I can't think of a better person than you to reflect on our moment in light of the experience that you had when The Color Purple came out.
AW: Well, you know, it’s not a pleasant feeling to be attacked for expressing the truth of your life, basically. This is how I, at the time, wanted to share what I understood of reality. And it was actually surprising and in some ways shocking that people were so afraid of it, and I understood that that was part of it, that they were really afraid. They were afraid of their own feelings where women loving women are concerned. They were really afraid when I said the God of the Bible was not the one that was interesting to me. So, I just basically bore it and lived my life outside of a lot of the controversy...
Whitewashing History?
Banished
07/21/21 • 30 min
In the mid-1930s, Russian-born muralist Victor Arnautoff was commissioned by the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Project to paint a series of frescoes at sites around the San Francisco Bay Area. One of his more ambitious undertakings covered 1,600 square feet of wall space inside the lobby and stairwells of George Washington High School, depicting scenes from Washington’s life as a military leader and statesman. Parts of the work portray a slaughtered Native American and enslaved African-Americans, which Arnautoff — a Communist whose art was an outgrowth of his activism — deliberately foregrounded.
Whatever his intentions at the time, Arnautoff is now at the center of a heated controversy among students, parents and community members, some of whom find the images traumatizing and want them “painted over” or removed. Host Amna Khalid spoke with those on both sides of the issue, equally passionate and resolute. She brings us the story.
FULL TRANSCRIPT*
ALLISON COLLINS: A Native American that is dead on a wall and having people walk over him? That has cultural significance.
DR. JOELY PROUDFIT: Enough is enough. Stop with the racism, stop with the dehumanization, stop with the genocidal artwork. Not in our public schools.
COLLINS: That painful history is not something that needs to be consistently in children’s faces.
JOHN LEARNED: Hey, as hard as those things are to look at, that's what really happened. There’s Indians that want to tell their history, they want people to know what happened.
AMNA KHALID: This is a story of a painting — “Life of Washington,” by Russian artist Victor Arnautoff. It hangs on the walls of a high school in San Francisco. And I say walls because it’s actually 13 separate paintings covering 1600 square feet. It’s a series of vivid and sometimes violent vignettes from George Washington's life. The first panel is of Washington in his 20s. Later on, a scene from the French and Indian War. The Boston Tea Party. Winter at Valley Forge. Surrender at Yorktown.
There are members of the community who find some of these images disturbing. Even traumatizing. One painting shows colonists walking past a Native American, dead on the ground. Another is of enslaved African-Americans on Washington’s plantation at Mount Vernon. Many students want the murals ... gone.
Of course, it’s not that simple. First, there’s a logistical problem: these are frescoes, which means they were applied directly onto the wet plaster of the walls. But the bigger problem is philosophical: Should we remove the art? Because there are just as many who want these frescoes to stay exactly where they are — where they’ve been since 1936 — forcing us to confront the atrocities of America’s founding for nearly a century. But do they really belong... in a high school?
I’m Amna Khalid, and this is Banished.
How do we reckon with painful reminders of past sins? What responsibility do we have to shield our children — or adults for that matter — from material that they find offensive? What do we do about paintings and ideas, even people, that we now find unacceptable? Do we just cancel them? What does that even mean? In the case of one high school in San Francisco, it might mean destroying art.
TRACY BROWN: The mural depicts violence and triggers emotional trauma, creating an unsafe environment which may get in the way of student learning. This mural has had no teaching significance ...
AMY ANDERSON: The depiction of indigenous warriors attacking white soldiers, who stand with the arms raised in surrender, erases the reality that George Washingtion ordered all-out war without diplomacy against indigenous peoples.
TRONG: This mural is not teaching students about the history of slavery and indigenous genocide under George Washington or other settlers. Instead it is teaching students to normalize violence and death of our Black and indigenous communities. Paint it down.
AK: Those are the voices of parents and students pleading with the San Francisco school board to paint over the mural. On social media, the movement is called “hashtag paint it down.” One of the women you heard was Amy Anderson. She’s an indigenous mother whose son was in 10th grade at the time. Here she is, again before the school board, on the image of the dead warrior face down on the ground.
ANDERSON: The size and placement of the deceased American Indian warrior creates in me a deep sadness for the millions of indigenous people who were killed by forced assimilation or all-out war. With the signers of the U.S. Constitution, George Washington stands beside the fallen warrior, but not a single eye is diverted in his direction. There is no remorse for his death. And students and staff w...
09/29/21 • 28 min
“Critical Race Theory,” also known as CRT, is a phrase that has become shorthand for just about any classroom instruction on racism, past or present. But what is this fight really about? What are these anti-CRT bills aiming to accomplish, and how will they affect schooling in the US? Amna Khalid discusses the rise of anti-CRT bills with Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy; Acadia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs; and former president of the ACLU, Professor Emerita Nadine Strossen of New York Law School.
SPEAKER 1: Critical race theory is teaching that white people are bad.
SPEAKER 2: We’re demonizing white people for being born.
SPEAKER 1: This theory was never meant to be brought into grade schools, high schools at all. It’s actually taught in the collegiate atmosphere.
SPEAKER 2: These are systemic things. Ignoring it perpetuates the problem. By acknowledging it, we can find solutions and we can address the problems and the inequality that exists in our country.
SPEAKER 3: You gonna deliberately teach kids: “This white kid right here got it better than you because he’s white”? You gonna purposely tell a white kid, “Oh, well, black people were all down and suppressed”? How do I have two medical degrees and I’m sitting here oppressed? [cheers] How did I get that? [cheers]
AMNA KHALID: Most parents of young schoolchildren are familiar with the stories--third graders in California are given an assignment: rank yourselves by power and privilege based on your racial identity. Parents in North Carolina say middle schoolers are forced to apologize in class to their peers for their privilege. In an elementary school in Manhattan, children are sorted by race for mandatory training. In some Buffalo schools, students are taught that all white people are guilty of implicit racial bias. Sometime towards the end of last year, parents and politicians freaked out, mostly conservatives, who see all this as a kind of liberal indoctrination of our youth. In at least 26 states around the country, Republican legislators have introduced what are now called anti-CRT bills. CRT stands for critical race theory, a phrase that has become shorthand for just about any classroom instruction on racism, past or present. But what is this fight really about? What are these bills aiming to accomplish and how will they affect schooling in the US? I spoke to three experts about the rise of anti-CRT bills. First is Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, who says that although CRT was coined decades ago as a purely legal, academic term, it has now all but lost its original meaning.
RANDALL KENNEDY: Now, if I'm in a seminar at my law school and we're talking about critical race theory, I'm thinking about a community of people, a community of thought that has its origins in the 1980s, that believes that liberal legalism was inadequate to get us to a state of racial justice. They’re people who believe that mere anti-discrimination would not suffice to redress the terrible injuries of racial oppression. Something much more activist, something much more deep-seated, had to be done to get us to where we needed to go. On the other hand, if we're just talking about on the street, if we're talking about television, if we're talking about radio today, for many people, especially for its most vocal critics, critical race theory is anything that they don't like that has to do with race. It's an open category and it's more of a slogan than anything else.
KHALID: Let's move a little bit away from its origins and from the academic context and think about what it's come to mean today, particularly when we're referring to these anti-CRT bills. We've seen a rise in bills that have been drafted across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states, where there is an attempt to banish, if you will, what they call teaching of critical race theory, particularly at the K-12 level. Now, as someone who is a scholar, a legal scholar, can powers that be do that? Is it legally sanctioned to stipulate what K-12 curriculum should be or is it in contravention of the First Amendment?
KENNEDY: It can be done. It's a well-known tenet of American practice that public primary and secondary schooling is largely under the control of local political forces. It's deemed to be perfectly proper for primary and secondary schools, for instance, to inculcate patriotism. You know, that's viewed as uncontroversial. Of course you're going to inculcate patriotism. Of course you're going to inculcate various attitudes that the ascendant political forces in your jurisdiction want to be taught in schools and nourished and lauded. We want our youngsters to know about the Founding Fathers and the greatness of American democracy, et cetera, et cetera. Well, if you can do a...
Out of Darkness, Into the Fire
Banished
12/08/21 • 28 min
Author and professor Ashley Hope Pérez gained prominence for her novel Out of Darkness, which explores themes of segregation, love and family against the backdrop of the 1937 New London School explosion. The book won rave reviews from critics and the Américas Award from the Library of Congress, but has recently become embroiled in controversy after calls to ban it from school libraries. Today on Banished, host Amna Khalid speaks with Pérez about the firestorm surrounding her book, and the rise in concerted efforts from a certain part of the political spectrum to censor literature that might highlight the troubling history of gender and race relations in the United States.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe
Common Sense, Unmasked
Banished
02/05/22 • 27 min
Michael Phillips has taught history at Collin College in Texas for the past 14 years, but after speaking out about the school’s anti-masking policy his contract was not renewed. Which makes him the fourth faculty member to lose his job there since Neil Matkin assumed the role of College President in 2015.
Amna Khalid spoke with Phillips about what led to his firing, and about academic freedom more generally in American higher education.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe
The Bother With Baby
Banished
12/30/21 • 20 min
Broadway-bound songsmith Frank Loesser wrote “Baby It’s Cold Outside” as a call-and-response duet for he and his wife to perform at parties. Several years later, the tune made its way into a movie and soon took the Christmas canon by storm. But is it a “rapey” relic of a bygone era that should be buried permanently in the winter snow? Amna Khalid investigates.
Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we’re offering 30% off a subscription to Booksmart Studios until the end of the year. You’ll get extra written content and access to bonus segments and written transcripts like this one. More importantly, you’ll be championing all the work we do here. Become a member of Booksmart Studios today. Thank you for your support.
* TRANSCRIPT *
MAN: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Do we have any more requests? WOMAN: Baby, It's Cold Outside! MAN: I think we can make that happen. Who wants to take the duet?
AMNA KHALID: In the new Netflix rom-com Love Hard, Josh volunteers to sing a duet with his girlfriend — his pretend girlfriend, actually — Natalie:
JOSH: Natalie and I got this one, Dad.
KHALID: The two are out caroling with his family in snowy Lake Placid.
NATALIE: Over my cold, dead, lifeless body. I am not singing that — that is like the sexual assault theme song.
KHALID: Natalie refuses at first to sing that Christmas song, because, you know, it's that song — the one in which a man is possibly pressuring a woman into spending the night. But Josh has an idea.
JOSH: Look, this is what we’re gonna do, okay? You just do your part. I will change my lyrics so the song doesn't sound so, uh, rapey. NATALIE: Fine, let's just get this over with. JOSH: Dad, hit it.
🎶
NATALIE: I really can’t stay JOSH: No problem, there’s the door NATALIE: I’ve got to go away JOSH: I hear you, say no more NATALIE: This evening has been JOSH: Totally consensual NATALIE: So very nice JOSH: I hope you get home safe tonight
KHALID: It's become fashionable in recent years to alter the lyrics of Baby, It's Cold Outside to make them less “rapey,” as the character Josh put it. Others have pushed back, however. The song, they claim, is about a desirous woman battling not the unwanted advances of her date but the unsolicited judgment of society.
🎶
LYNN GARLAND: I really can't stay FRANK LOESSER: But Baby, it's cold outside GARLAND: I've got to go away LOESSER: But Baby, it's cold outside GARLAND: This evening has been — LOESSER: Been hoping that you'd drop in GARLAND: So very nice LOESSER: I'll hold your hands, they're just like ice
KHALID: I'm Amna Khalid. On this episode of Banished, The Bother with Baby.
CHRIS WILLMAN: The song was written in 1944 as a song that Frank Loesser and his wife originally sang at a housewarming party.
KHALID: Chris Willman is a longtime music journalist, currently at Variety.
WILLMAN: Kind of like, the night’s about to end, we’re about to kick you out, and here’s a song about whether to stay or whether to go.
KHALID: Wow, I would have loved to be at that party.
WILLMAN: Oh, yeah. And apparently they performed it over a period of years to the point that, when it was licensed for a film in 1949, Frank Loesser’s wife resented it. She may have been joking, but she was resentful that it was no longer their private thing because they were such a hit on the party circuit with it.
KHALID: The song existed in private for five years, sung only by Loesser and his wife Lynn Garland. The two made one of the very first recordings of the song, which we’re listening to now.
🎶
LOESSER: Baby, make my conscious your guide GARLAND: I really can't stay LOESSER: Oh, Baby, don't hold out GARLAND AND LOESSER: Ah but it's cold outside LOESSER/GARLAND in the clear
KHALID: Baby was evocative of the holidays, it was redolent of cigarettes and booze and, yes, it was sexually suggestive.
GARLAND: And it was our song.
KHALID: That’s Lynn Garland from the documentary Heart and Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesser:
GARLAND: And we became the most desired guests at parties from coast to coast. And we never failed to slam.
KHALID: Garland recalled once that, "Parties were built around our being the closing act.”
🎶
LOESSER: I thrill when you touch my hand GARLAND: But don't you see? LOESSER: How can you do this thing to me?
KHALID: It was merely the opening act, however, for the song itself....
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FAQ
How many episodes does Banished have?
Banished currently has 37 episodes available.
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The podcast is about Society & Culture, History and Podcasts.
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The episode title 'Expanding the Canon: Are 'Great Books' Obsolete?' is the most popular.
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The average episode length on Banished is 25 minutes.
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Episodes of Banished are typically released every 14 days.
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The first episode of Banished was released on Jun 25, 2021.
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