Title: “Generational Talent” by Pete Muller, Mack Meller, and Andrew White
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is a famous pop singer.
Answer: KELLY CLARKSON
puzzle approx. 20 mins; meta quite a while!
BenChen71 filling in for Matt Gaffney. However, this meta was a few metas ago for me, so I don’t recall much about completing the grid, other than it involved quite a lot of Googling. Once the grid was filled, there appeared to be five themers:
16-A: [Singer whose highest-charting hit was parodied as “Word Crimes” by Weird Al] = ROBIN THICKE. I absolutely adore the Weird Al song, which goes some way to redeeming the original “Blurred Lines” with its utterly appalling celebration of riding roughshod over consent.
23-A: [Vermonty Python is in its “Flavor Graveyard”] = BEN AND JERRYS.
37-A: [Doobie Brother with the memoir “What a Fool Believes”] = MICHAEL MCDONALD.
46-A: [Cabinet position held by Marcia Fudge until March 2024] = HUD SECTRETARY.
57-A: [E Street Band guitarist inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014] = NILS LOFGREN.
What now? I remember spinning my wheels for quite a while. The puzzle title had me thinking about GEN X, MILLENIALS, BOOMERS, etc. But nothing in the grid or themers seemed to relate.
Because I have a life, and an unfinished meta is like a mind virus that can consume my every waking thought, I jumped onto discord for a hint (don’t @ me!) Someone there had said something about focussing on the first word of each themer and adding something. Yes, this was a pretty big hint, but you can’t always help what your eyes see when looking at the group solve channel!
Anyhoo, it turns out you can add SON as a suffix to the first word of each themer which then forms a surname of a singer whose first name is the first word of another clue:
ROBINSON > 56-A Smokey > COP
BENSON > 10-A George > KAT
MICHAELSON > 59-D Ingrid > LIV
HUDSON > 28-D Jennifer > RACH
NILSSON > 11-D Harry > ANNOY
With some judicious anagramming (is there a way of ordering these that doesn’t require anagramming that I failed to notice? please tell me in the comments!) the first letters of these entries spell CLARK. If we do the “add SON” trick once more, we get CLARKSON. I looked for Kelly in the clues, but it’s not there. So presumably we just have to make the jump to KELLY CLARKSON which was accepted as a correct answer on Pete’s website.
In hindsight, it’s possible if I’d spent more time, I might have seen it without the nudge. HUD to HUDSON with “Jennifer” in the clues should probably have been doable. But I will never know for sure!
I wonder what song Pete will choose to cover. Here’s hoping for “Stronger”:
Ingrid Michaelson? Who?? Don’t know her, didn’t recognize any of her songs, (even after Googling) and question whether she’s a legit fifth singer to make this theme happen. I miss the days when a certain degree of name recognition (at least!) was required for an artist’s inclusion as an important piece of a theme. It’s a solid, clever idea for sure, but probably not gettable without Googling. And that just seems wrong to me.
Most people under 40 know Ingrid Michaelson and her top songs. Not everything has to be boomer-approved to be relevant.
FWIW I’m mid-40s and Ingrid Michaelson is quite well-known in my book… even seen her in concert! Actually all five were in my window which is lucky but even if one isn’t, then yay learning something new.
Add me to the list of 40-somethings who know Ingrid Michaelson. (I feel like “The Way I Am” was all over the place for a year or so.)
Thanks Ben
151 correct this month, so the puzzle played easier than usual for a November.
We could have put parenthetical numbers by the theme entries to indicate the desired order, but we omitted them to add a little more difficulty.
In hindsight, perhaps we should have done the enumeration.
As for the cover, we picked one of my faves, “My Life Would Suck Without You.”
Great cover, Pete!
Thanks Ben!
I got stuck thinking one of the meta first names was 29A “Paul who was named People’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2021” since 10A “George Herriman’s ‘Krazy’ critter” did not match the pattern of only using the first name in the clue.