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By Agnes Davidson and C.C. Burnikel
©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
12/04/18

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

12/04/18

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Tuesday, December 4, 2018

ACROSS
1 Fights (for)
5 “Whip It” rock 
band
9 __-slapper: funny 
joke
13 On the road
14 Biblical paradise
15 Dr. Hahn on 
“Grey’s Anatomy”
16 Hesitation from 
Sylvester?
18 Center of activity
19 Fireplace 
receptacle
20 Accomplishment 
by Porky?
22 Former Fox TV 
series set in 
Newport Beach
23 Curly cabbage
24 Minor flap
25 Ringing organ, at 
times
26 Detergent brand
28 ’60s hallucinogen
30 Pierre’s negative
31 Near-failing mark
33 Reach its 
destination, as 
a trip
35 Slim candle
37 Affirmative from 
Tony?
40 Royal crown
42 Slim fish
43 Tech sch. near 
Albany, N.Y.
46 Win, place or 
show
47 Seasonal shelf 
sitter
49 __ moment’s 
notice
51 Curved shape
53 “Frozen” sister
55 Charged 
particles
57 One of Crayola’s 
hundreds
59 Story from 
Remy?
61 Greek goddess of 
wisdom
62 “Don’t Cry for 
Me Argentina” 
musical
63 Water source for 
Simba?
65 Fainthearted
66 Fairy tale heavy
67 Out of the wind
68 “Frozen” reindeer
69 “That was close!”
70 Scottish 
monster’s loch

DOWN
1 Obey an eviction 
notice
2 “He scammed 
me!”
3 Neon diner sign
4 Food service 
giant
5 College faculty 
head
6 End of a 
professor’s URL
7 Italian scooter
8 Playwright 
Eugene
9 Emmy winner 
Steve of “60 
Minutes”
10 “Good shot!”
11 Quito’s country
12 Crayola 
Factory’s 
Pennsylvania 
home
15 Trains over the 
street
17 Running rate
21 Unified whole, in 
psychology
23 Film title 
“Citizen”
27 Trappings of 
royalty
29 One of a 
calendar septet

32 Incoming flight 
info
34 “The Chronic” 
rapper, familiarly
36 Each
38 Rage
39 Red and Yellow
40 Israeli port on the 
Mediterranean
41 “The hour has 
arrived”
44 Brewpub draft
45 Unexpected 
turns of events

46 Special Forces 
headgear
48 Abide by
50 Plays a part
52 Construction site 
sights
54 “The Lord of the 
Rings” actor Sean
56 Horse’s 
mouthful?
58 “Not again!”
60 Smidgen
61 From the top
64 Portland’s st.

Surely the Second Coming 
of ‘Yeezus’ is approaching

November has come and gone, 
and Yandhi left with it. Despite 
enthusiastic words from Kim 
Kardashian, it was no surprise 
that Kanye West’s supposed 
ninth studio album did not 
appear on streaming services this 
Black Friday — a fact his legions 
had earlier been forced to come 
to terms with after Mr. West took 
to Twitter to go back on his wife’s 
promise.
All signs point to Yandhi 
being a spiritual sequel of sorts 
to Kanye’s 2013 output, Yeezus, 
(the similar title and cover art 
are the biggest clues) but taking 
into account how much Kanye’s 
career trajectory has changed in 
the half decade since the release 
of Yeezus, this act of continuation 
all seems a farce.
If there’s one thing Kanye 
has done well, it’s constantly 
evolving and pushing boundaries 
as an artist while still keeping 
everything 
precisely 
Kanye. 
Prior to this year’s ye, each of 
his albums ushered in a distinct 
era for the man: in his music, 
his fashion, his character. The 
best part of this was that Kanye 
always seemed to know when to 
pivot, when rockstar Kanye or 
soulful Kanye had overstayed 
their welcome, and to break 
down, rebuild and rebrand.
I would argue that no Kanye 
album ever needs a sequel. (Yes, 
I know The College Dropout, 
Late Registration and Graduation 
form a trilogy of sorts, but 
while thematically and slightly 
musically similar, they all have 
their own defining sound and 
Kanye himself was a much 
different person in 2004 than 
he was in 2007). And therein 
lies the core frustration with 
Yandhi. Any attempt to recreate 
the minimalist panache of Yeezus 
will result in failure. Yeezus is 
the culmination of every Kanye 
West we’ve ever known and 
every album he has ever offered, 
combined and distilled to the 
barest form. It is Kanye at his 
most complete.
Setting 
the 
contemporary 
politics of Kanye aside for the 
slightest moment, what little he 
has revealed about Yandhi spells 
unfulfillment. 
Starting 
with 
the two aforementioned chains 
which bind it to Yeezus, the name 
and the cover, one can infer the 
only reason for the similarity was 
to drive hype, in the same way that 
the first release date we got (“9 29 
18”) turned out to be a ploy to get 
the Kanye faithful to tune into 
a “Saturday Night Live” season 
premiere the same day, trading 
high attention and ratings for a 
surreal performance of “I Love 
It” with Lil Pump. But, in order 
to dive into Yandhi, one first has 
to understand Yeezus and what it 
represents, and what happened to 
Kanye in the meantime.
Yeezus’s 
cover, 
or 
lack 
thereof, is the perfect primer 
to the musical equivalent of a 
dental drill which lies within. 
As noted in a phenomenal Daily 
article regarding the album’s 
relationship with architecture 
and an interview Kanye did with 
The New York Times, Yeezus was 
in part recorded in an acoustically 
terrible Paris apartment, forcing 
the songs “to be super simple, 
because if you turned up some 
complicated sound and a track 
with too much bass, it’s not going 
to work in that space.” The cover 
is perhaps the simplest you can 
be, and speaking about the sparse 
promotion of the album Kanye 
echoes the same sentiment: “Shit, 
we ain’t even got no cover. We just 
made some real music.”
Regardless of the critical art 
theory lens through which the 
cover can be viewed, it’s clear 
that sound is Yeezus’s main, 
and perhaps only, focus. Which 
is almost ironic considering it 
came during the peak of Kanye’s 
arrogance: The days of VMA-
interrupting 
Kanye, 
whom 
Barack Obama even freely called 
a jackass, had somehow been 
eclipsed, replaced with a man 
who appeared to have seen it 
all, teetering between insanity 
and earnestness as he drilled 

hours 
of 
apocalyptic 
gospel 
and sublime self-affirmation to 
unready radio hosts. So, when 
you hear this variant of Kanye is 
releasing an album comparing 
himself to a savior revered by 
billions of people right from the 
title, you can’t help but roll your 
eyes, all while buckling up for the 
absolute.
And 
Yeezus 
immediately 
thrusts you into a car crash, as 
“On Sight” is every part abrasive 
and 
boundary-pushing 
while 
still retaining a certain charm, 
everything a Kanye song should 
be. The industrial soundscape of 
this introduction is interrupted 
halfway 
by 
something 
that 
defined 
early 
Kanye 
(what 
is 
“soul,” 
Alex?) 
when 
the 
synthesizers give way to a choir 
chanting “He’ll give us what 
we need / it may not be what 
we want.” This austere contrast 
of “On Sight” is a microcosm 
of everything Yeezus is: the 
intersection between harsh noise 
and soothing melodies, Kanye 
honing his craft of dredging up 
the most obscure yet pertinent 
samples and music as the starkest 
representation of the self.
There is no defining sound 
of Yeezus other than abstract 
sound itself. The sirens and 
distortion of “Send It Up” make it 
a more approachable “On Sight;” 
“Black Skinhead” would fit right 
in with Graduation and My 
Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s 
stadium rap anthems, save the 
zealous manifesto against the 
establishment and its racism; 
and “Guilt Trip” and its Kid 
Cudi croons feel an extension 
of the love and loss present on 
808s & Heartbreak. Each song 
starts with a single sound, be it 
the soft press of a piano key or 
a grisly drone, and then takes 
that sound and smashes it open, 
layering the space inside with 
Kanye’s vocals and stripped-
down drum patterns. And while 
Yeezus definitely pulls from the 
prior discography, it is as much a 
synthesis as it is a reconstruction.
The primary instrument of 
the album is the voice, whether 
that of Kanye, a collaborating 
artist or a sample. The artist’s 
full vocal range is on display, 
from his booming, grumbling 
bars on “I Am A God” to the 
auto-tuned trill found late in 
“Blood On The Leaves.” It is 
underpinned by a wealth of other 
singers and rappers — Chief 
Keef, Frank Ocean and Bon 
Iver, to name a few. The prolific 
samples themselves take on a 
life of their own, as Kanye and 
his legendary production team 
revive everything from Nina 
Simone’s rendition of “Strange 
Fruit” to a Hungarian rock power 
ballad. The kicker? The only 
official featured artist is God 
himself. Kanye is at the absolute 
forefront, asserting himself as 
the divinely untouchable and 
smashing open the musical ore to 
reveal 10 disparate crystals and 
their translucent mystery.
Yeezus is at the same time 
everything 
and 
nothing, 
an 
amalgamation and a destruction. 
I’ve talked about the progression 
of Kanye in a way that could 
make 
him 
seem 
like 
some 
“Split”-esque host for multiple 
personalities, whereas in reality 
all of these different Kanyes 
are just manifestations of some 
facet of his personality blown up 
to larger-than-life proportions. 
Work with me here, but consider 
Kanye West as a cow: Each cut 
of meat represents the Kanye 
associated 
with 
a 
specific 
album. They all vary in flavor 
and tenderness, but at their core 
they are all the same, all some 
sort of beef. Yeezus is the meat 
grinder into which everything 
was shoved in an attempt to make 
the perfect blend, employing 
each cut’s idiosyncratic taste and 
cutting out the fat.
But what do you do with the 
sonic sausage that pops out of 
the grinder? In The Life of Pablo’s 
case, you throw it in the trash. 
Yeezus 
broke 
Kanye’s 
music 
down and fashioned together 
something more complete with 
the resultant shards, but Pablo 
shattered everything completely. 
It’s hard to expand on perfect, so 
Kanye did what any perfectionist 

would do. He started anew on 
the quest to reach perfection, 
again. And with this blank slate, 
Kanye continued to find ways to 
innovate, literally going beyond 
the boundaries of an album. 
While it’s completely valid to 
dismiss The Life of Pablo as 
messy and unfinished (“Ima fix 
wolves”), the constant updates 
and abstract, jagged nature of 
it make sense when you view it 
as, in Kanye’s words, “a living 
breathing 
changing 
creative 
expression.”
While the initial reception to 
The Life of Pablo was mixed for a 
Kanye album, after people started 
to spend more time and live in 
conjunction with music, Kanye’s 
status as a genius auteur was not 
challenged. However, and it was 
hard to see then, chinks in the 
armor were beginning to expose 
themselves.
This 
vulnerability 
can 
be 
primarily found in some of the 
songs on Pablo. The production 
is excellent, as always, but for 
an album themed around the 
interplay between West’s public 
and private lives and reconciling 
with oneself, some of the lyrics 
are downright terrible. Yeezus 
has a few incendiary lines here 
and there (“Eatin’ Asian pussy, 
all I need was sweet and sour 
sauce” and “get this bitch shaking 
like Parkinson’s” surely stick 
with the listener) but they came 
off as an ironic self-awareness 
of West’s penchant to provoke. 
Yet on Pablo you get thought 
provoking verses like “I bet me 
and Ray J would be friends / if 
we ain’t love the same bitch” and, 
of course, the infamous “Now if 
I fuck this model / and she just 
bleached her asshole / and I get 
bleach on my T-shirt / I’mma 
feel like an asshole.” On Yeezus, 
Kanye asserted he’d “rather be 
a dick than a swallower,” but it 
resonated because his blunt and 
brash bravado was the point. 
He broke meaning down to the 
nitty-gritty but still conveyed 
exactly what he was thinking 
and feeling. He was a little lost 
with Pablo, and anyone looking 
for anything profound started 
to grasp at straws; Kanye being 
gross and ridiculous was nothing 
more than Kanye being gross and 
ridiculous.
When The Life of Pablo was 
released, the president who called 
Kanye West a jackass was still in 
office, and things — Kanye, our 
country — were OK. Nonetheless, 
it only took a few months for both 
of them to backslide. Kanye’s 
appearances on the Saint Pablo 
Tour became more a space for 
him to orate increasingly neurotic 
rants, culminating in a Nov. 17 
performance where he stated “If 
I would have voted, I would have 
voted for (Donald) Trump” and 
one two days later where he held 
the crowd verbally hostage and 
launched into a tirade against 
Hillary Clinton, Facebook and 
Jay-Z, among other things, after 
only performing three songs. The 
rest of the tour was cancelled 
shortly after, citing stress and 
exhaustion — ironically, the two 
feelings most of the country 
was wrought with after election 
night.
The ensuing spiral pulled 
Kanye down further and further. 
He was hospitalized for sleep 
deprivation 
and 
dehydration 
following the cancellation of 
the tour, and his first public 
resurfacing was in the lobby of 
Trump Tower, where West and 
the 
president-elect 
discussed 
“life.” It soon became clear 
that Kanye was suffering from 
severe mental health issues, but 
this led to the most fervent fans 
defending him and rephrasing 
his endorsement as something 
out of his control, a by-product 
of the toll stress, depression and 
paranoia exacted on him.
And as Kanye got worse, 
he made it harder and harder 
for himself to detach from the 
controversy. After a year of 
relative silence, he returned to 
Twitter in spring of this year, 
tweeting support of conservative 
personality 
Candace 
Owens. 
This snowballed into an erratic 
appearance 
on 
TMZ, 
where 
he made headlines for saying 
slavery “sounds like a choice.” 

ROBERT MANSUETTI
Daily Arts Writer

MUSIC NOTEBOOK
The summer gave us more 
doses of “dragon energy,” and 
at “SNL”’s season premiere in 
Sept. he quickly swapped his 
Perrier bottle cosplay for that red 
Make America Great Again hat 
to throw a rambling Pro-Trump 
speech at an uncomfortable cast 
and audience, inciting criticism 
from Kenan Thompson and even 
Lana Del Rey.
The situation was dire for 
Kanye stans, with tons jumping 
ship and even more expressing 
some form of betrayal. Some still 
held on that this did not spell the 
end for Kanye West and he would 
persevere, acknowledge his faults 
and grow from them. Then came 
what they thought was the nail in 
the coffin, his absolutely surreal 
conversation 
with 
President 
Trump in the Oval Office, which 
covered topics like the “iPlane 1” 
and the superhero armor Kanye 
felt the MAGA hat bestowed 
upon him. It seemed the only 
people left supporting him where 
the same ones who levelled racist 
comments against him for his 
nationally televised remark that 
“George Bush doesn’t care about 
Black people.”
Supporting 
Donald 
Trump 
doesn’t automatically make you 
a bad person. Falling prey to his 
treacherous rhetoric and being 
pulled 
into 
the 
inescapable 
hurricane of which Trump is the 
eye is when it starts to get ugly, 
and that’s precisely what Kanye 
did. Now, if this was a hip-hop 
artist of similar merit who had 
openly embraced conservative 
views for their whole career, this 
would be a different story, but 
this is Kanye West we are talking 
about.
Kanye West, the man who 
rapped “How we stop the Black 
Panthers? 
/ 
Ronald 
Reagan 
cooked up an answer / You hear 
that? What Gil Scott was hearin’ / 
When our heroes or heroines got 
hooked on heroin / crack raised 
the murder rate in D.C. and 
Maryland / we invested in that, 
it’s like we got Merrill Lynched 
/ and we been hangin’ from the 
same tree ever since.” The man 
who gave a giant middle finger to 
the one percent on Yeezus, telling 
people like Trump “Fuck you and 
your Hampton house.” Kanye’s 
fans looked up to him not only 
for his musical prowess but for 
him using his platform to call out 
those in power when no one else 
was holding them accountable 
and give a voice to the voiceless, 
however loud-mouthed it may 
be. And now this man makes a 
complete 180° to support the man 
who called African countries 
“shitholes,” 
who 
said 
there 
was “very fine people on both 
sides” after white nationalists 
attacked and even killed counter-
protestors in Charlottesville and 
who preferred the term “son of a 
bitch” for Colin Kaepernick and 
other NFL players who chose 
not to stand for an anthem that 
romanticizes a country doing 
little to fight against police 

brutality, racial injustice and 
systematic oppression.
Vocally 
and 
passionately 
supporting the president makes 
everything that Kanye had been 
saying for decades sound like 
an empty lie. Kanye West, once 
Yeezus, to many Lord and Savior, 
denied us three times, and many 
more after that.
However, on Oct. 30, supposed 
salvation arrived on the limbs of 
140 characters. Ye, his preferred 
name on Twitter, proclaimed 
he had “been used to spread 
messages (he doesn’t believe in)” 
and he was trading politics for a 
refocused creative spirit. Hip-
hop hypebeasts and the general 
public could finally breathe the 
collective sigh of relief; Kanye’s 
long national nightmare was 
over. Except, the Kanye we got 
back wasn’t the same one who 
left us.
Pre-2016, I was always one to 
speak out against Kanye slander, 
arguing that the man who many 
saw as just a narcissistic asshole 
was 
a 
complex 
artist 
with 
complex problems, overinflating 
his ego to try and cope with battles 
against anxiety and self-image all 
while pushing the envelope of 
modern rap and giving us radical 
genre-bending music. You could 
make a case for every album of 
his up to Yeezus as his best. But 
when push came to shove and 
the controversies centered less 
around the person and more 
their politics, I could no longer 
let Kanye off the hook. Defending 
him turned into an uphill battle 
with an exponential incline, and 
trying to push a boulder up it 
would cause unnecessary stress 
and harm to myself. I let it roll 
down the hill. I gave up on Kanye 
West, and you should too.
If there’s one thing though, at 
least he finally gave me an album 
I can assuredly place as his worst. 
Every valid criticism about The 
Life of Pablo and more can be 
applied to ye: unfocused, sloppy, 
forgettable. The gross lines are 
multiplied (“Let me hit it raw like 
fuck the outcome / ay, none of us 
would be here without cum” is 
about the deepest thought he can 
muster and “I pray your body’s 
draped more like mine and not 
like your mommy’s” is a mind-
boggling thing to say about your 
newborn daughter), the beats 
are stagnant and uninspired 
and there’s a puzzlingly high 
amount of Ty Dolla $ign and 
PARTYNEXTDOOR 
on 
the 
record. On songs like “I Thought 
About 
Killing 
You” 
West 
maunders about faux-highbrow, 
superficial philosophy, coming 
off as, for lack of a better word, 
a cringe-inducing edgelord and 
rapping version of the “Rick and 
Morty” high IQ copypasta.
For 
years, 
fans 
defiantly 
believed Kanye knew what he 
was doing, that behind his ever-
shifting, inflammatory persona 
was someone who could see all, 
do all, pull all the strings. Yet 
when their favorite artist started 

to support their least favorite 
political figure, he was being 
used. He was in the sunken place. 
He was now a hostage rather 
than a creation. In a Noisey 
article of similar caliber, the 
writer felt Kanye “made a deal 
with the devil,” that in return for 
being able to make Yeezus he had 
to turn over the keys. Make no 
mistake though, as every tweet 
Kanye ever sent, every pro-Trump 
statement he ever espoused was 
done willfully. Upholding this 
narrative of a Kanye possessed 
can only become more dangerous 
with time.
Still, this all makes me wonder 
if Kanye knew what he was doing 
in the first place. Did we all just 
vastly misinterpret his outbursts, 
his publicity stunts and his 
music as incomprehensible for 
us mere mortals instead of the 
lucky doings of a fool? Parroting 
Patrick Bateman’s rhetoric, there 
is an idea of a Kanye West, but no 
real Kanye.
I hope the one thing you take 
away from this article is to turn 
a blind eye to Kanye no longer, 
especially when, or even if, Yandhi 
is released. Not even considering 
his politics, the album just seems 
like a bad idea. With the title of 
Yeezus, West embraced his god-
like status, enveloped himself 
in it, but Yandhi sounds like the 
best the people responsible for 
the titles of the “Fast & Furious” 
franchise could come up with if 
given five minutes to think of a 
title for a sequel to Yeezus. The 
cover artwork feels lazy this time 
around, only adding color, a more 
intricate jewel case and a rainbow 
sheen to follow up an album 
defined by a lack of color and 
the dynamics of black and white. 
Now, I could be wrong, and he 
could return with the undisputed 
best album of his career, but even 
still, in no way would it be an 
act of redemption. The Kanye 
West we thought we knew and 
loved for so long is dead, and this 
bizarro husk of Kanye West we 
have in 2018 consciously killed 
him. Premeditated murder.
Kanye would be hard-pressed 
to find success on his second 
quest for perfection. Yeezus was 
the summation of a lifetime’s 
work, and the natural response 
to such a tight, dense work is 
release. With The Life of Pablo 
he did exactly that, but after 
Kanye rode that horse until it 
could go no more, for once in his 
life, he had no idea where to go 
next. ye was a wrong step in the 
alt-right direction, and trying to 
rekindle the flame of something 
as singular as Yeezus with Yandhi 
spells the end is “nigh.”
Returning to the gospel sample 
of “On Sight” five years later — 
“He’ll give us what we need / 
it may not be what we want” — 
more doubt is cast on the belief 
Kanye gave us what we needed 
with Yeezus. Now, he certainly 
isn’t giving us what we need, and, 
as much I hate to say it, he no 
longer knows what we want.

6 — Tuesday, December 4, 2018
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

