Loud subgenre of punk / WED 1-16-19 / Dubious Tibetan sighting / Bakery-cafe chain

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty: Medium (4:12)

THEME: double puns — so ... imagined spoken phrases where the first part is left blank, and instead of a familiar two-word phrase, there is a phrase made up of homophones of both words, i.e. a wacky phrase, which is suggested by the rest of the imagined spoken phrase in the theme clue (note: any theme that takes this long to accurately describe is almost certainly a hot mess):

Theme answers:

• "BUTT WEIGHT" (17A: "___, do these jeans make me look fat?")
• "AISLE BEE" (25A: "___! The flight attendant just swatted a bug!")
• "BUY CHANTS" (36A: "___, would you like to purchase some religious music?")
• "EWE GUISE" (53A: "___ and those crazy sheep costumes!")
• "CZECH PLEAS" (62A: "___! Petr, I'm begging you again to let me get this!")

Word of the Day: SCREAMO (46D: Loud subgenre of punk) —

Screamo (also referred to as skramz) is an aggressive subgenre of emo that emerged in the early 1990s, emphasizing "willfully experimental dissonance and dynamics."^[2] It was pioneered by San Diego bands Heroin and Antioch Arrow and developed in the late 1990s mainly by bands from the East Coast of the United Statessuch as Orchid, Saetia, and Pg. 99. Screamo is strongly influenced by hardcore punkand characterized by the use of screamed vocals. Lyrical themes usually include emotional pain, romantic interest, politics, and human rights. "Screamo" has often been mistakenly used as an umbrella term for any music that features screamed vocals. (wikipedia)

Painful from start to finish, but particularly painful in the themers. There is no concept here. There is nothing clever holding this together, giving it definition, making it ... in any way meaningful. The homophonic phrases are totally random, have nothing in common, are not the same part of speech even ... make no sense on a grammatical level ... The cluing concept is atrocious. This is the editor's job. Doesn't matter if the constructor doesn't know what he's doing, the editor has to make this thing work, and its "working" depends *entirely* on the clues. And what do we get? Horrendously forced and awkward sounding quotes. The answers appear to want to be plays on words *and* work within the context of the imagined quote, but they just can't do both. And the relationship between the answer and the rest of the quotation is all over the map. What is the rest of the quotation supposed to be doing? It's providing a context, but what kind and how much? "Do these jeans make me look fat?" is a question aboutBUTT WEIGHT, but "Petr, I'm begging you again to let me get this" appears to be the CZECH PLEASthemselves. The worst and most confusing of these is the "by chance" / BUY CHANTS substitutions, since it's asking you to imagine an imperative (BUY CHANTS!) followed by an interrogative ??? ("would you like to purchase some religious music?"). It's all just so sloppy. There has to be some better way to tie all this double-homophone stuff together. Ugh, EWE GUISE is off too. "Those crazy sheep costumes!"? The wording just makes no sense. It's all torture. Any wordplay fun is completed drained out by the incompetent cluing. These kinds of clues have to work TOAT (ugh, one of my least fav crossword answers), and they have to be Funny; these failed on both counts.


Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld (Twitter @rexparker / #NYTXW)

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