999,850: Ray Charles & Betty Carter — Baby, It's Cold Outside

Well before Sublime ruined the date rape song, Broadway vet Frank Loesser penned the lyrics to "Baby, It's Cold Outside", the preeminent example of the genre, which made the Billboard Best Seller Chart top 10 with two different versions, won an Oscar, and caused the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Usually sung as a duet, "Baby It's Cold Outside" features two characters: the "mouse", who is trying to get home to her mother and father and aunt and sister and brother after a pleasant date with the "wolf", who is using the chilly weather as a pretense to liquor the mouse up and bang her (as is so often the case in nature).

That this is somehow considered a Christmas song is an indictment of our culture, or at least that was the view of influential Islamist thinker Sayyib Qutb. An Egyptian religious scholar, Qutb spent two years in the states observing all manner of decadent, sinful behavior, such as that which occurred at a church dance he attended in the late '40s. When "Baby, It's Cold Outside" began to play on the phonograph, Qutb witnessed the abominable American ritual known as "slow-dancing", which included offenses against God like "light petting" and even "making out". For this and other shocking and unforgivable transgressions, Qutb labeled all of Western modernity as anti-humanity in such widely read books as "The America I Have Seen", which found its way into the hands of Al Qaeda luminaries Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama Bin Laden. You know the rest. Pricks.

Anyway, the song's been recorded about six thousand million times by all manner of artists using variable amounts of irony. Heard here is the Ray Charles/Betty Carter version, from 1961, which is the only one of them to crack the Billboard Hot 100. While most popular renditions of the tune play the wolf/mouse conflict with almost unbearable amounts of light comedy (keep a large vomit pail handy if you'd like to brave the Sammy Davis Jr./Carmen McRae interpretation), Charles and Carter figured out how to make the song sexy. Charles' genius for arrangement comes to the fore, as he chooses an achingly slow tempo to draw out the verses, allowing himself and Carter a lot of room to play with the phrasing—her reading of "Maybe I'd better scurry", coy and beguiling, is particularly lovely. I'd set this song up against the best offered by radical Islam any day of the week.