Rapper who forms one half of duo Black Star / WED 12-2-20 / Channel that became Spike TV / Film auteur Miyazaki / Classic 1960 platinum-selling Miles Davis album

Constructor: Will Nediger

Relative difficulty: Medium (well under 5 to finish, but then another two point five minutes finding the bad square ... that's two complete checks of the Acrosses and Downs before I noticed the screw-up, bah)

THEME: FRUIT (60A: Type of food whose outsides are suggested by the outsides of 17-, 29-, 43- and 55-Across) — "outsides" of the themers are letters that spell out "outsides" of FRUIT:

Theme answers:

• "SKETCHES OF SPAIN" (17A: Classic 1960 platinum-selling Miles Davis album)
• PEA GRAVEL (29A: Small stones used for driveways)
• ZEITGEIST (43A: Spirit of the age)
• RIGHT THIS SECOND (55A: "Like ... now!")

Word of the Day: HAYAO Miyazaki (14A: Film auteur Miyazaki) —

Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎 駿, Miyazaki Hayao, [mijaꜜzaki hajaꜜo]; born 5 January 1941) is a Japanese animator, director, producer, screenwriter, author, and manga artist. A co-founder of Studio Ghibli, a film and animation studio, he has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and as a maker of animated feature films, and is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished filmmakers in the history of animation. [...] Miyazaki co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985. He directed numerous films with Ghibli, including Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki's Delivery Service(1989), and Porco Rosso (1992). The films were met with critical and commercial success in Japan. Miyazaki's film Princess Mononoke was the first animated film ever to win the Japan Academy Prize for Picture of the Year, and briefly became the highest-grossing film in Japan following its release in 1997; its distribution to the Western world greatly increased Ghibli's popularity and influence outside Japan. His 2001 film Spirited Awaybecame the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards and is frequently ranked among the greatest films of the 2000s. Miyazaki's later films—Howl's Moving Castle (2004), Ponyo(2008), and The Wind Rises (2013)—also enjoyed critical and commercial success. Following the release of The Wind Rises, Miyazaki announced his retirement from feature films, though he returned to work on a new feature film in 2016. (wikipedia)

We'll start with the one significant problem with this theme, which is one of these four is not like the others, and that one is "zest." There's no doubt that "zest" does indeed come from the outside of a FRUIT (commonly, a lemon or lime), but zest the other three (peel rind skin) are complete outer coverings, whereas "zest" is only the very outer layer of that covering. It's not akin to peel, it is, in fact, a subset of peel. It's part of the peel. Again, a lawyer for this puzzle will tell you that the clue only says "outside" and you can't deny blah blah blah but this is the outside of something you have already labeled as an outside and so "zest" suffers from non-equivalency, boo. Luckily, this is really the only complaint I have about this theme, which is nicely executed. Really feels like I've seen it before, but when the execution (that is to say, the actual answers you use for your FRUIT outsides) is so colorful and vivid, that's really all that matters. You can take a basic, even a fairly tired, theme-type and execute it so originally and neatly that no one will care about theme originality. If the execution's original, there you go. And every one of these themers is a shiny little answer in its own right, theme or no theme. It's always nice to have the revealer produce a genuine "aha," as this one did, but it's also important that the solving experience was enjoyable on the way to that "aha," and today, for me, for the most part, it was.