Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Bacchanal honoree / SUN 11-15-26 / Landmark 1988 Japanese animated film / Emmitt and kin, in "Zootopia" / Another name for the Slayer Handbook, in the "Buffy" franchise / Giving thought to somebody? / Singer longtime cast member on the Real Housewives of New York City / "Hang tight," in textspeak / Lead-in to "curious," for a food website / "Gilmore Girls" creator ___ Sherman-Palladino / Sherlock's sister on TV / Instrument with an endpin / One-named singer who collaborated with the Velvet Underground / Clergyperson on the bimah / ___ Beth Denberg, original cast member of "All That"

Constructor: Sala Wanetick and Emily Biegas

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Side Tracks" — theme answers are PARENTHETICAL parts of famous songs (69A: What six answers in this puzzle are vis-à-vis the song titles in their clues)

Theme answers:

(EVERYBODY DANCE NOW) (23A: "Gonna Make You Sweat" (1990)) (by C&C Music Factory)

(SHE'S SO HEAVY) (34A: "I Want You" (1969)) (by the Beatles)

(PUT A RING ON IT) (43A: "Single Ladies" (2008)) (by Beyoncé)

(OH, WHAT A NIGHT) (93A: "December, 1963" (1975)) (by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons)

(NAIVE MELODY) (103A: "This Must Be the Place" (1983)) (by Talking Heads)

(THE PIÑA COLADA SONG) (116A: "Escape" (1979)) (by Rupert Holmes)

Word of the Day: SPOT TESTS (36D: Some quick chemical assessments) —

Spot analysis, spot test analysis, or a spot test is a chemical test, a simple and efficient technique where analytic assays are executed in only one, or a few drops, of a chemical solution, preferably in a great piece of filter paper, without using any sophisticated instrumentation. The development and popularization of the test is credited to Fritz Feigl. [...] A spot assay or spot test can also refer to a specific test in microbiology. This test is often used to check the growth rate of bacterial or yeast cells on different media or to perform serial dilution tests of micro-organisms. Usually a 96-pinner (often called frogger) is used to perform these spot assay. Another application is high-throughput screening, which often uses spot assays to determine the growth of eg. mated cells or to check for protein-protein interactions in a yeast two-hybrid test. This is often done with a robot.(wikipedia)

• • •

Look, I enjoy remembering songs, and so I enjoyed this puzzle, but I think it has one serious problem: namely (!), that it leans so heavily into names, particularly pop culture names, when the puzzle is already, thematically, entirely pop culture-based. Like, you should be leaning strongly away from pop culture in the fill when you've got a theme like this—a theme that requires solvers to have very specific knowledge of bygone songs. But instead, right off the bat, we've got Real Housewives "stars" (???) and Gilmore Girls creators and comedians and animated OTTERS (48A: Emmitt and kin, in "Zootopia") and some elephant named ELMER and whatever VAMPYR is ... on and on and on. Don't make solvers choke on your pop culture hobby horses. OK, OK, you love Buffy and Gilmore Girls, great, but yeesh, dial it back. Back. Farther. That AKIRA / LORI crossing is potentially hairy. I don't even know what All That is, let alone who was in the "original cast" (?!?!!), so LORI was an absolute WTF for me (100D: ___ Beth Denberg, original cast member of "All That"), but I do know something about manga and anime, so AKIRA was easy (109A: Landmark 1988 Japanese animated film). I guess if I hadn't known AKIRA or LORI (and I suspect there are many such people), I could've inferred the "R," but still ... there's a carelessness, bordering on recklessness, to the profusion of pop culture today. Luckily for me, today's songs and their PARENTHETICALs were all well known to me. Softballs. I crushed this thing. Not a record time, I don't think, but getting down near that territory.

I think the puzzle probably doesn't deserve three stars, but I really like a lot of these songs, so I can't say I didn't have a good time. That said, the revealer is weak (merely descriptive), and merely being PARENTHETICAL doesn't really make the answers that interesting, especially if you don't know the songs (or the PARENTHETICAL part, at any rate). But if you're my age (soon to be 57), and you pay even passing attention to popular music, then these songs should mostly be very familiar. The only one I balked at was 93A: "December, 1963" (1975)—I know the song well, but I would've told you it was called "OH WHAT A NIGHT." Late December back in '63. What a very special time for me. As I remember. What a night. (Me, I wasn't born yet—in '63, that is; in 1975, when the song came out, definitely born). The theme answer I expect to be least well known to solvers is NAIVE MELODY, since that song has the least claim to "hit" out of all of these (peaking at no. 62 on the U.S. charts).* The song has special crossword relevance, though, as it features strongly in the 2005 crossword tournament documentary Wordplay (in a melancholy cover by Shawn Colvin).

The hardest parts of the puzzle by far, for me, were the edges—those colonnades of 9s. Never heard of SPOT TESTS (which really looks like something a wordlist barfed up, all 1-pt Scrabble tiles (+ "P"), bleh). ATTESTS TO is basically its more familiar doppelgänger (again, all 1-pt tiles, no "P" this time). The other side of the grid is much prettier. No complaints there. But I had to work a lot of those 3-letter crosses to figure those longer answers out. Not getting from "bunny ears" to PEACE SIGN since "bunny ears" involve specific placement of the fingers behind someone's head, don't they? Then TELEPATHY had a "?" clue (good, but not easy) (53D: Giving thought to somebody?). But unless you are completely pop culture illiterate, there aren't any genuinely tough parts of this puzzle.

Bullets:

59A: Relating to Leo XIV, e.g. (PAPAL) — me: "why another random Leo, crossword!? What is it with you and LEOs??" Of course he's not a random LEO (like LEOI, LEOII, LEOV, all of whom have been xword answers)—he's the current pope. Chicago, baby! U!S!A!, U!S!A!

64A: [Wags finger] ("UH UH") — needed crosses here, for sure. I guess is the Dikembe Mutombo kind of finger wag:

76A: Lead-in to "curious," for a food website (EPI-) — I know the site (by name, anyway), but this clue is still awkward. I read "for a food website" as "for any food website" (which is how "for a ___" parts of clues usually work). [One of six, supposedly, for a seer] = SENSE (actual clue/answer from earlier this year). Not one specific seer—all seers. I get that EPI- is garbage fill and you want to make it interesting, but the phrasing just gets awkward here.
28A: "Hang tight," in textspeak (BRB) — "be right back"
87A: Feminist scholar Butler (JUDITH) — Gender Trouble! The cover of this book is soooo familiar to me because every "Women's Studies" student I knew circa 1990 (and I knew a bunch) owned a copy. I must've owned a copy at some point too.

35D; Broccoli unit (HEAD) — me: "SPEAR ... SPEAR ... fit, damn you!"

70D: One-named singer who collaborated with the Velvet Underground (NICO) — I knew this, but spelling eluded me. NIKO? NEKO? NECO?

6D: Clergyperson on the bimah (RABBI) — hell yeah! Last week's Word of the Day, coming in handy! Knowing what a "bimah" is (elevated platform from which the Torah is read) made this clue a gimme.

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Puzzlemaker Eric Berlin has made a suite of puzzles as a fundraiser for the National Immigrant Justice Center. It's called "Patchwork Country." Here's an explanation of the project, from Eric himself:

I am a puzzle constructor for the New York Times, LinkedIn, and other venues, and the author of many puzzle books. (Perhaps you or your kids read my "Winston Breen" novels at some point.) [...] And what are these puzzles? It's a set of 18 Patchworks. This is a variation on the common crossword. Instead of words reading across and down, you have words reading across and then other answers in irregular patches throughout the grid. You'll need to figure out where each Patch answer should be placed, using the Across answers to guide you.

If you've never tried a Patchwork before, you can try one right now -- I post a new one most Fridays on my Puzzlesnacks site.

Patchwork Country starts off with three introductory puzzles for the newcomers, then a suite of ten Patchworks with an additional twist, and then five more bonus puzzles. If you like word puzzles, I think you'll really enjoy these!

Eric is a witty and experienced puzzlemaker. I donated to this project as soon as he told me about it. I hope you'll consider doing the same. For details on how to donate to the National Immigrant Justice Center and receive your Patchwork Country puzzle suite, please go here.

P.P.S. happy belated birthday, Rebekah!

*"I Want You (SHE'S SO HEAVY)" is technically the song with least claim to being a "hit," since it's the only one of today's theme set that was not released as a single, but it's on Abbey Road, which makes it, like every song on that album, pretty dang famous. More famous than the Talking Heads song? Probably. But I have no way of measuring this. I know both songs like the back of my hand.

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