Coastal African desert / MON 8-26-24 / Athleisure lead-in to "lemon" / Popular dance fitness program

Constructor: Zachary David Levy

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (solved Downs-only) (finished with an error, though)

THEME: TRIPLE WORD SCORE (58A: Coveted Scrabble space ... or the sheet music for 16-, 21-, 34- or 51-Across?) — song titles where a single word is tripled:

Theme answers:

• "GIMME GIMME GIMME" (16A: Abba hit of 1979)
• "BYE BYE BYE" (21A: 'N Sync hit of 2000)
• "GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS" (34A: Mötley Crüe hit of 1987)
• "FUN FUN FUN" (51A: Beach Boys hit of 1964)

Word of the Day: NAMIB (4D: Coastal African desert) —

The Namib (/ˈnɑːmɪb/ NAH-mib; Portuguese: Namibe) is a coastal desert in Southern Africa. According to the broadest definition, the Namib stretches for more than 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) along the Atlantic coasts of Angola, Namibia, and northwest South Africa, extending southward from the Carunjamba River in Angola, through Namibia and to the Olifants River in Western Cape, South Africa. The Namib's northernmost portion, which extends 450 kilometres (280 mi) from the Angola-Namibia border, is known as Moçâmedes Desert, while its southern portion approaches the neighboring Kalahari Desert. From the Atlantic coast eastward, the Namib gradually ascends in elevation, reaching up to 200 kilometres (120 mi) inland to the foot of the Great Escarpment. Annual precipitation ranges from 2 millimetres (0.079 in) in the aridest regions to 200 millimetres (7.9 in) at the escarpment, making the Namib the only true desert in southern Africa. Having endured arid or semi-arid conditions for roughly 55–80 million years, the Namib may be the oldest desert in the world and contains some of the world's driest regions, with only western South America's Atacama Desert to challenge it for age and aridity benchmarks. (wikipedia)

This is one I definitely appreciated more when I got the revealer *and* looked at the theme-answer clues. Before that, solving Downs-only, it was just a lot of repeated-word phrases, and even when I got TRIPLE WORD SCORE, I didn't see the musical connection. But now, seeing that all the theme answers are songs, the "SCORE" pun becomes clear. I think of "SCORE" as music composed for a movie, but it's also just the "copy of a musical composition in printed or written notation" (merriam-webster dot com). I also think of "sheet music" as primarily orchestral—it's definitely not a phrase I'd put anywhere near Mötley Crüe, for instance—but there's "sheet music" for all kinds of music (even "GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS"), so even though the "sheet music" bit feels a *little* preposterous, on a technical level, it works. The theme is, by its nature, repetitive, and those theme answers were (therefore) really easy to get solving Downs-only, but still, conceptually, with *that* revealer, it's pretty good.