New York Times, Friday, July 21, 2017

This crossword was born after I noticed something in crossword puzzle forums. Whenever people complain about trivia in crosswords, the first thing they attack is automatically rapper names. Not, like, the 1950's Olympians or bygone opera stars that show up in crosswords from time to time. It seems like it's always, without fail, the names of popular rappers. It doesn't even matter if the artist in question has sold millions of albums, or how many times their songs have been on the charts— rap references always attract ire from some part of the solving public.

My natural response was to make a puzzle seeded by a 12-letter rap artist. If you're a fan of BIGGIE SMALLS, I hope you got something out of seeing his name in the puzzle. If you're unfamiliar with his name, that's fine too. As long as you feel you learned something.

Rant aside, I like the feel of this puzzle. It's not perfect, but the grid definitely has my vibe. I'm a fan of a lot of the debut entries— 59A, 7D, 21D, and especially 35D have been in my list of seed entries for a while. Plus, I love the works referenced in 5D and 42D, and I'm always glad to sneak a Lady Gaga reference (39A) into the Gray Lady.

Playing you off with this!

Love the featured I NEED A MOMENT and BIGGIE SMALLS — I'm not the most diehard of rap fans, but what a great name, BIGGIE SMALLS. You know you've made it big(gie) when you get not one but two awesome monikers that stick (The Notorious B.I.G. is his other one). I also like that Paolo chose a rapper whose stage name is made of real(ish) words, rather than two tough proper nouns, i.e. TALIB KWELI. I have to imagine that for non-rap fans, BIGGIE SMALLS is at least gettable without needing every crossing answer.

So difficult to seed a themeless with 12-letter entries. Those black squares to the left of I NEED A MOMENT already start fixing a grid pattern into place, rarely a good thing for constructors, needing maximum flexibility to move black squares around.

There aren't very many long entries — just ten that are eight letters or longer — but Paolo does include a few nice mid-length entries to spice things up. FAN DUEL is familiar to this fantasy basketball fan, and MINI ME (so tough to parse that French-looking MINIME string), CANAPE, LES MIZ are all nice.

I did struggle around LES MIZ though, as I've seen it written LES MIS, too. Surely there couldn't be a one-name singer whose name starts with Z, right? Wrong! I have (sort of) heard of Zayn (Malik), formerly of One Direction, but I had already put LAID in where LAIN was supposed to go.

Is that south section fair, i.e. should educated solvers be expected to know ZAYN without needing every cross? On the one hand, he did have a #1 hit in 2016. On the other, there are so many crazily-named singers out there, that SAYD or SAYN seems plausible too. I think a clearer clue for LAIN would have made things better, perhaps a "Biblically" descriptor.

MALE GAZE wasn't familiar to me, but it was interesting to read up on — I do like to learn one, maybe two things, from a single crossword.

But GALOP … what an oddball word. It does seem fair(ish) now that it's been in the NYT, but I'd personally try everything I could to excise it.

Overall, some great feature entries, but not enough for my taste, especially given the presence of liabilities like ELLS, SKED, ENSEAL. It's too bad that there weren't more long entries in the grid in total — with just ten long slots, I feel like every one of them has to land with power. Didn't quite happen for me.