#7 - "Piling Up the Hits" and #7a - "What Do You Want?"

[Cindy]

Solved both now.

[ChrisKochmanski]

Guessed at the record label fairly early on, but it took some time to confirm it. For those only mostly sure of the solution, keep looking, because the 100% click IS there.

Now if only I were seeing anything for the song ...

[Meg]

All I can say is if you’ve never heard of the song that is the meta, it’s pretty impossible to get it. For me, the only way was to use Google. When the title popped up as the first hit, I was very surprised AND I felt a lot better about my inability to see the path to the answer.

[ChrisKochmanski]

7c -- Finally got the song. The problem was, I had never heard of it! If I had, I think this meta would have been a quick and easy one.

[TMart]

Got the song - good one! Still working on the record label.

Finally got back to it after a busy couple of days, and got the record label as well. Now I'm done for the weekend with four metas in the bag.

Great puzzles! I agree, pgw is a force to be reckoned with - great new style, interesting grids and fun concepts (the Clue puzzle last week was genius). Very impressed with the meta construction on #7, and #7a was a fun "aha" moment.

[BarbaraK]

7c -- Finally got the song. The problem was, I had never heard of it! If I had, I think this meta would have been a quick and easy one.

I'd heard of the song, but one of the steps to get there required help from google, which says something about our relative levels of cultural sophistication.

[Hector]

Finally got to 100% on the label. Nice one. There's an exceptionally deep rabbit hole, though, which I'll describe on Tuesday, which involves a word in the grid that I'd never encountered before and which turns out to have a second meaning that seemed WAY too theme-relevant to be a coincidence.

[LesY]

Solved the record label - lots of satisfying pieces and a really great puzzle!

I'm not sure about the song, which usually means I'm wrong, except...there's a tantalizing piece of potential confirmation that simply has to be true...just not sure if that's because I want it to be true, or because it truly is.

[Hector]

So 21A is SKATS, clued as pairs of cards in the card game. But SKATS is also the acronym for Standard Korean Alphabet Transliteration System. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKATS). Intentional rabbit hole? (Plus, backwards, it reads like "STAX.")

[BrianMac]

Had a feeling I was missing something on this one. I did not notice the first words of the "transliterated" entries spelled out STACKS. I suspected the answer was STAX based on the title (that never happens to me), so I was pre-disposed to get there. I justified it because the theme entries were "stacked," but it did bother me that I couldn't find a proper "STACKS" anywhere to correspond to STAX.

Got the song with no problem, but John Lee Hooker is one of my favorites...Boom Boom!

[LesY]

I missed the song (which I should have gotten) but had a fun alternative path:

- Thought there were embedded universities with one wrong letter in each theme answer (LOU/LSU, NCONN/UCONN, UELA/UCLA). As in “what do U want?” from the title.
- Amazingly the wrong letters spell out ONE, a U2 song.
- Seemed a little rough - why stretch to King Louis XV from Lou, NCONN/UCONN isn’t very elegant, etc.
- But one of the non-theme entries is a political figure from Myanmar the band has had a long history with. Felt sure that wasn’t a coincidence!
- And then it turns out I got part of the song anyway! (still wrong)

Oh well, maybe I was still thinking about the recent Gaffney meta with the Ivy League schools.

Nailed the STAX puzzle though. On to the next!

[Laura M]

Had a feeling I was missing something on this one. I did not notice the first words of the "transliterated" entries spelled out STACKS. I suspected the answer was STAX based on the title (that never happens to me), so I was pre-disposed to get there. I justified it because the theme entries were "stacked," but it did bother me that I couldn't find a proper "STACKS" anywhere to correspond to STAX.

Got the song with no problem, but John Lee Hooker is one of my favorites...Boom Boom!

Hey, did you put in "like" buttons? Excellent, thanks!

Anyway, identical path for me. I looked at the first letters and thought "They're all consonants, that's not going to go anywhere." (Obviously I must have skipped over ACKS.) This is the first time I can remember getting a meta right without really solving it correctly!