Style of Southern hip-hop / SAT 7-14-18 / Banana Republic's parent company / Symbol of change in math / City license once needed to work in establishment serving alcohol / Ancient city rediscovered in 1870 / Home to ancient Zapotec civilization / Strain of potent marijuana

Constructor: Kameron Austin Collins

Relative difficulty: Medium (8:16) (possibly easier: one possibly idiosyncratic mistake made a Huge difference today) (possibly harder, if your knowledge of rap or weed is not strong, or at least existent)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: CRUNK (34D: Style of Southern hip-hop) —

Crunk is a subgenre of hip hop music that emerged in the early 1990s and gained mainstream success during the mid 2000s. Crunk is often up-tempo and one of Southern hip hop's more dance and club oriented subgenres. An archetypal crunk track frequently uses a main groove consisting of layered keyboard synths, a drum machine rhythm, heavy basslines, and shouting vocals, often in a call and response manner. The term "crunk" is also used as a blanket term to denote any style of Southern hip hop, a side effect of the genre's breakthrough to the mainstream. The word derives from its African-American slang past-participle form, "crunk", of the verb "to crank" (as in the phrase "crank up"). (wikipedia)

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What a lovely puzzle. Or, for me, five puzzles, because all five sections (the corners + the fat middle) played differently from one another. Easy, medium, hard (both inherently hard and hard-because-of-error)—this thing ran the gamut. In the end, my time was just average, but it felt like I was one kind-of-dumb mistake away from lighting it up, burning it down. After fighting my way out of the NW (ARRIS!? APSIS?! Yikes; NTESTS, ugh), I thought I'd come storming down into the middle, but after I gave up on STIP-something and wrote in STROBE LIGHT at 14D: Party flasher, things came to a halt right quick. Wrote in GNARL at 31A: Get all twisted up (RAVEL) and that pretty much killed things in the middle for a while. Then I lucked out: I knew CRUNK. CRUNK feels like a crucial answer, and a serious generational dividing line. If you know enough about rap to know subgenres, well, here's not just the answer, but a very very important "K," the lead letter in 48A: Term of respect in old westerns ... so, effectively, here is the entire SE corner, on a platter. No CRUNK, no korner. I would've been baffled by the [Term of respect...] if not for that "K," but with (only) the "K," I got KEMO SABE and the SW corner went down in sub-Monday time. Not kidding. I remember nothing. It filled itself in. Didn't even see half the clues. Total fire hazard, that corner. Whoosh. So at that point, my experience was Medium (NW), gruesome (middle), and Kids' Menu Easy (SE). Onward!


Even with the top and bottom of MORAL CENTER, still couldn't see it at first (21D: Source of guiding principles). So, two corners down, (amoral) center still elusive. Went into the NE corner very confident. Had that sweet DOT sitting there, giving me first letters of all those Acrosses. And boom there goes DISBAR, boom there goes ON TIME, bo ... bi ... er ... hmm, what "parent company" could start with a "T"? Better check the Downs ... hmmm, OK 11D: Like valentines, starts "AM-" ... how 'bout AMOROUS!? Oh yeah, now we're cooking (narrator's voice: he was not cooking). I just got destroyed up there, and all because of two answers. 8D: Like the best streams? (IN HD). This is a horrible clue, mostly because, as a "?" clue, it offers actually no "?"-type wordplay. No familiar phrase, no pun. Streaming is a real thing, streams are real things (video-wise, I mean), so there's no real "?"-worthiness. And the phrasing on the clue evokes ... nothing. So I'm looking for a word that goes with the word "stream," four letters, starts "IN-." Nothing. Same parsing problem on the "parent company." Not expecting two words. Possibly because everyone knows the store as GAP. It's officially THE GAP, but first sentence of damn wikipedia entry (which is titled "Gap Inc." btw) says, "The Gap, Inc., commonly known as Gap Inc. or Gap, (stylized as GAP) is an American worldwide clothing and accessories retailer" (emph mine). So, staring down a six-letter answer that starts with "T" that is a "parent company," I went with ... can you guess?  ... that's right, TARGET! Oy. I never made it out of there. Had to finish center and work my way back up (via back ends of STEEL CAGE and AMATORY). 


How did I manage to tip the center with no further help from the corners? Honestly, it was just CAVER (28D: Speleologist). Once I committed to that answer, GNARL went out, RAVEL went in. Then, knowing 31D: Give up probably started RE- (it did: RENOUNCE), I had the E, E, and -IC in GENETIC and I saw it! Match, meet newspaper. Once again, whoosh. There went the center. It was that easy. But only after it was that difficult. Finished up in the SW, thanks to getting GERMANE instantly, off the "G" (33D: Material), and also thanks to having recently looked up KUSH for some reason. That is, I knew it was  pot, but needed specifics. I forget why. I don't even smoke. I just wanted to know. Anyway, bone up on your pot and rap terminology if you want to have a future in solving. Not joking. OK, bye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. there was hardly any junk in this grid, and what little there was was Saved By Rhyme (SBR). When your fill is slime, try a rhyme! Need AMUCK? Bring in a duck! Stuck with ARRIS? You'll always have Paris! Etc.

P.P.S. some puzzle suggestions for you Saturday solvers. Peter Broda has a suite of Vowelless Crossword Puzzles available right now (ed. Andy Kravis). Vowelless crosswords are a really entertaining, and tough, variation on your favorite pastime. Seven puzzles, pay what you want. Get them here. Also, be sure to check out this past week's American Values Crossword second puzzle, a "labyrinth-style puzzle" by Francis Heaney, entitled "The Maze Ruiner." If you're not already a subscriber, just pay the $1 and get it a la carte. I promise you, you'll be wowed. It might take you half and hour, or an hour, or a day, or longer, but It Is Worth It. Really impressive work. Very clipboard-worthy. Get it here.

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