SOUNDTRACK: LYRIC JONES-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #57 (July 29, 2020).
Lyric Jones is a delight. A smart, thoughtful woman who not only raps really well, she has a great singing voice too.
She talks A LOT between songs. She plays 3 songs in 21 minutes. She talks a lot about her hustling–driving for Uber and Lyft as well as all of the running around one has to do to be a musician.
Lyric makes it abundantly clear that her hustle is nonstop – writing, rapping, singing, drumming, engineering, and grinding it out to make Gas Money (the title of her latest album). This quintuple threat, trained in the Berklee College of Music’s City Music program, recorded this Tiny Desk (home) concert from her studio in Los Angeles in May.
“All Mine” opens the song and I love how she plays her electronics while keeping her flow fresh.
My favorite song is “Adulting.” I love watching her create the song a capella–making the beats and the music looping her voice and manipulating it with electronics.
Her multi-layered prowess is present on “Adulting” a song about the evolutionary growth that happens in your late 20s and early 30s. Lyric uses a TC Helicon vocal processor to create percussive beats, looping her voice as a backdrop and packing a punch with vocal harmonies and ad libs.
After the song she jokes about how in the song she is complaining about wanting to stay home all day and not get up and do shit. Be careful what you wish for.
Before the last song she has two important things. First, how you can support Lyric Jones (ha). But she takes the virus seriously, encouraging everyone to be kind to ourselves and patient with ourselves. It’s important to feed ourselves mentally, creatively and to literally feed ourselves.
In grappling with the pandemic, Lyric expresses the deep importance of this moment: “Whatever we put out in this time, in this era is a bookmark in history. Especially as musicians. … For me, my personal testament, I want to be intentional. … My children’s children are gonna know about this time. And I want to know that I impacted it with intentional music, intentional thoughts, insights and perspectives.”
She ends with “Lush Lux Life,” her “affirmation song” about “what I should be doing–living luxuriously.” I really like this song for the excellent retro-sounding music behind the song. I’m really curious if the jam at the end of the song is new or a sample from an interesting rocking jazzy solo. Her producer Nameless has some great skill.
[READ: July 29, 2020] Thinking Inside the Box
A couple of years ago I read Cluetopia, a history of the crossword puzzle written from a British writer. Now here’s a book about crossword puzzles written from an American writer.
Is the country significant? In some ways, very much so. Because Americans and Britons have very different styles of crossword. Americans’ puzzles are full of puns and definitions as well as facts and information. British crosswords are known as cryptics and are mostly full of wordplay–you don’t need external information to solve the puzzles, exactly. Most of the time the clue contains all you need to find the answer (sometimes it even contains the answer itself) but they are quite challenging.
Other than that, the origin of the author is not that significant, because the origins of the crossword are the same regardless where you write from. Arthur Wynne was a Liverpudlian lad who moved to Pittsburgh and then to New York City. He worked on the New York World which was eventually run by Joseph Pulitzer. (It’s ironic that awards of excellence are in his name since he ran the World full of pulpy news and yellow journalism).
In 1913, Wynne was put in charge of the FUN section. He needed to fill space so he came up with a Word-Cross Puzzle. It was shaped like a diamond and the three and four letter answers ran around a center hole. He based it on similar word puzzles he had seen as a child in England. The puzzle became a weekly feature. Eventually a typo changed it to crossword. The puzzles weren’t especially challenging because they were meant to be fun.
Wynne wanted to patent the crossword but the paper wouldn’t pay for the expense.
He got tired of making crosswords so he suggested that readers try to make their own. This worked too well and in 1915 he asked people to stop as he said he had enough entries to go until 2100. Even now, the lead in is pretty lengthy (unless something especially topical comes up) with many puzzles accepted in March coming out in October.
Wynne was careless with the puzzle too. Eventually, he turned it over to Margaret Petherbridge. At first didn’t care all that much about it, but when it was brought to her attention that something with her name on it was really in bad shape she fixed it up to be “the essence of perfection.” She also made all of the clues designed to be across and down and made the grids symmetrical and interlocked.
By 1924 crosswords were a craze. Simon ans Schuster published their first book–a collection of crosswords. Although they weren’t convinced of its success it soon became the cornerstone of their publishing house –they have never not had a crossword puzzle book in print. Soon 60% of commuters were doing them and contests soon followed.
The way this book differs from Cluetopia is that Raphel looks at things other than history. Chapter 3 is called How to Construct a Crossword. She describes the process of submitting to the New York Times (and if the author of a book about crossword puzzles has her submission rejected, you can imagine how hard it is to get one into the paper. There are lots of how-to manuals as well as computer programs that can help you fill in a grid, but the Times puzzlers like creativity and originality.
Since this book is mostly about the New York Times crossword, there is of course a lot about Will Shortz, both his biography (which is fascinating–he created his own college major–“enigmatology”) and how he works.
She also talks about the amusing history of how Britain initially tried to keep crosswords out of their culture–they believed it was corrupting the country. But of course, when crosswords came to Britain–the Cryptics–they took off pretty quickly as well. The grand poobah of the cryptic crossword was Edward Powys Mathers–his pseudonym was Torquemada (most cryptic crossword creators use pseudonyms).
Raphel also takes the discussion of crosswords in unexpected directions–ones that are perfectly apt for our age. She looks at race and gender in the puzzle. The crossword puzzle is primarily written by white males. For a time, women were 30% of the creators, but that has dropped to about 18%. Part of this is due to technology and the ease of using computer programs to fill in some of the spaces.
Shortz has also said that he added more diversity to his staff to check if some words may not be acceptable.
Another great section in the book is about Vladimir Nabokov and his love of crosswords. Both doing them and creating them–like the ones he made when he was writing letters to his wife Vera.
The end of the book talks about large gatherings of crossword lovers (obviously this was in the old days). She attended and entered the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Shortz created it the Tournament in 1978. In that year, 149 people showed up. In 2006, after the documentary Wordplay mentioned it, crowds rose to over 700. She went in 2019 and her account of the ACPT is pretty fun both for the way her family did and the overall tone of the tournament.
She also talks about the New York Times celebrating the 75th anniversary of their crossword puzzle with a seven night cruise aboard the Queen Mary 2. She went on it and was pretty much overwhelmed by the cruciverbalists.
There s a section about crosswords in pop culture. It’s kind of interesting although is a bit long and tangential. Starting with Inspector Morse and moving the P.G. Wodehouse, she moves on to the novels of Nero Blanc and The Crossword Mystery–a Hallmark series. She also has a lengthy bit about Sex and the City.
In therms of art she talks about Rene Magritte and “This is not a pipe.” There’s an awful lot about pipes and it takes a while to get where it’s going, but it it is a a fun tangent.
Then of course there’s technology. Both older technology and 21st century apps. The Times’ crossword puzzle app is a huge success although when the Mini Crossword debuted in 2014 there was an outcry at what a sellout it was–one person (a huge crossword fan) claimed it was waste of time (a waste of whole minute, my goodness!).
There is also the incredibly moving segment about the Hardest Crossword when Shortz placed a few crossword puzzles show what Alzheimer’s was like. It had clues like “Marie had fun with them on April Fool’s.” Marie can’t remember–she can’t fill in this blank. And neither can we. Wow.
This is a really enjoyable book. Raphel’s writing style is fun and conversational and this book flows pretty quickly. It’s also fun to read about some of these gatherings that I’ve never been to.
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