6 — Friday, January 17, 2020
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

WHISPER

SUBMIT A 
WHISPER

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

By David Van Houten
©2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
01/17/20

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

01/17/20

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Friday, January 17, 2020

ACROSS
1 “__ Is Betta Than 
Evvah!”: 1976 
R&B album
5 “Disgusting!”
8 “The Real 
Housewives” 
series airer
13 Sprat’s choice
14 Slice of pizza?
15 Consuming
17 What dogs do to 
set a tempo?
19 One making 
amends
20 __ dog
21 Uproars
23 Miler Sebastian
24 Bartender’s 
lager-serving 
skill?
28 “Just __”
32 Creepy glance
33 Word said with 
a sigh
34 School subj.
36 Self-service bar 
offering
40 Convenience for 
a fish traveling 
around the city?
44 Join
45 Excavation
46 Green subj.
47 Barflies
50 Works free
52 Annoyed answer 
to “How’s your 
jobless roommate 
working out?”?
56 Beer choice
57 Prefix with byte
58 Name on 
Re-Nutriv 
cosmetics
63 Sport played 
on a variety of 
surfaces
65 Malady that 
accounts for four 
Across puzzle 
answers
68 V-8, for example
69 1979 Hockey Hall 
of Fame inductee
70 Brest bestie
71 Mild oaths
72 Feed bit
73 Coffee __

DOWN
1 Italy’s Isola d’__
2 Blue-green shade

3 Cover during a 
delay
4 Pharaoh’s 
symbol
5 Gun designer 
__ Gal
6 Beloved person
7 Follows
8 Babies leader?
9 Total mess
10 Words on the 
first of a set, 
perhaps
11 Leonardo’s 
birthplace
12 Situation after a 
leadoff double
16 One of the 
Bradys
18 House of Dana 
fragrance
22 Down (with)
25 Old map abbr.
26 Octa- plus two
27 Sour __
28 1995 Oscar-
nominated 
animatronics film
29 Pizazz
30 Credits heading
31 Rate
35 Like Brahms’ 
Symphony No. 2

37 Tie (up)
38 “... __ is given”: 
Isaiah
39 PC connections
41 Palomino pace
42 Missile site
43 Hunchbacked 
assistant
48 Dissertations
49 Preacher’s msg.
51 Binged (on)
52 Quick meal
53 Capsize

54 Japanese comics
55 Large mackerel
59 Union member’s 
nemesis
60 Great work
61 Academy 
award-winning 
director Kazan
62 Fall site
64 Diarist Anaïs
66 History book 
chapter
67 Fine print, say

SUDOKU

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WHISPER

50 Characters. 
Bare your soul.

Introducing

“Where’s 
Taco Bell?” 

“I’m not 
sure if I still 
want to be 
ur friend 
(!!!)”

“Youtube 
premium 
needs to 
chill out”

MUSIC NOTEBOOK
STYLE COLUMN

Listening to Pop Smoke: 
an ill-advised decision
Consent and queer media

JIM WILSON
Daily Arts Writer

DANGER
KEEP OUT
HAZARDOUS MUSIC
As they say, “listening to Pop 
Smoke is always an ill-advised 
decision.” All right, maybe it’s just 
me (I say it at least once each week), 
but it’s true — the Brooklyn driller 
has the ability (read: gift) to pull 
listeners into his world and never 
let go. This, of course, isn’t a bad 
thing by any means, but it can create 
some sticky situations for sure. In 
the car, Pop Smoke can cause you 
to miss your turn and get lost. At 
a party, Pop Smoke can make you 
ignore everyone around you and 
exist solely as a body for the music 
to move through. In short, Pop 
Smoke can cause people to do some 
pretty wild things, but why? The 
answer, of course, is multifaceted, 
but it all comes down to one thing: 
808 Melo, his producer.
The East London producer 
has been crafting beats for UK 
drill and UK hip-hop acts for the 
past couple of years, but he has 
only produced a one-hit wonder, 
“Know Better,” a disrespectful and 
boastful track by Headie One and 
Rv. The dissonant melodies, off-
kilter hi-hats and sliding 808s on 
the vocal sample provide the two 
men with the perfect sonic palette 
to talk some greasy shit and spew 
rude comments. Thanks to 808 
Melo, “Know Better” has become 
a quintessential UK drill song and 
has even been used by Stormzy 
in his disappointing Wiley send, 
“DISAPPOINTED.”
Suffice to say, Melo’s time was 
bound to come, but he’d need an 
American to do it: someone with 
global appeal and what is to some 
a more tolerable accent. Pop Smoke 
was that someone. From the get-
go, the two men were a match 
made in drill heaven. Their earliest 
collaborations 
include 
“MPR” 
and “Flexin’,” two hard-hitting, 
hard-nose, hard-ass songs that 
immediately yanked listeners into 

their frigid landscapes. Though the 
sound had been popular in the UK 
since around 2016, to Americans, it 
was fresh and new. It was exciting 
in the same way Atlanta trap and 
Chicago drill were exciting when 
they first exploded into the scene. 
Now, all Melo and Pop would need 
was a breakout hit.
“Welcome to the Party” was that 
hit. When the track came out in May 
2019, it immediately caught fire. 
And for good reason. “Welcome 
to the Party” is an absolute banger, 
and I don’t say that lightly. It’s 
the kind of song that commands 
everyone’s attention for the track’s 
entire three minute and thirty-four 
second runtime. Pop Smoke is cold 
as ice on the track, using a staccato 
flow to deliver absurdist tough talk 
like “Bitch, I’m a thot, get me lit / 
Gun on my hip / One in the head 
/ Ten in the clip” and “Don’t let 
that Henny in my system / I catch 
a body, next day I forget it.” In his 
words, to be “welcome to the party” 
is to do what he has already been 
doing. The beauty of Pop Smoke is 
how assured of himself he is, like 
he knows he was bound to be the 
first to blow up with this sound. His 
charisma and energy is just plain 
infectious. 
However, 808 Melo is the 
reason that Pop Smoke was able to 
flex and move the way he does on 
“Welcome to the Party.” Melo’s beat 
is kicked off with what may be the 
best producer tag of 2019: a female 
voice slowly declaring, “Thisssss 
issss a Melooo beat.” As soon as the 
tag drops, you know both Pop and 

Melo are going to go to work. Melo 
does most of the heavy lifting by 
crafting an expertly simple beat, 
highlighted by reversed horror 
movie piano slashes and pulsating, 
gurgling 808 slides. Pop Smoke and 
808 Melo prove on “Welcome to the 
Party” that they’re the new rapper-
producer dynamic duo, and no one 
is going to challenge them soon.
Pop Smoke, thanks to “Welcome 
to the Party,” is on his way to 
becoming a breakout star, the 
harbinger of Brooklyn drill, similar 
to how Chief Keef introduced the 
world to Chicago drill. Hell, he was 
featured on Travis Scott’s Jackboys 
compilation on the song “GATTI,” 
co-produced by (surprise, surprise) 
808 Melo. Most of Pop’s other 
songs are variations on “Welcome 
to the Party,” but they all work so 
well that it does not matter at all. 
However, when Pop does break the 
mold, he transcends. On “PTSD,” 
from his debut tape Meet the Woo, 
he does his best 50 Cent impression 
and crushes it, delivering an 
impassioned 
and 
emotional 
performance. With time, hopefully, 
he continues to both break the mold 
while creating more drill classics.
What’s the point of all this? I’ll 
tell you: Pop Smoke is a force of 
nature, a veritable black hole. His 
charismatic gravity is so strong that 
nothing can escape him. He is one 
man sufficiently compact enough 
to disrupt the four dimensions of 
the spacetime continuum. So, don’t 
say I didn’t warn you when — not if 
— Pop Smoke takes over your entire 
world.

Trigger warning: This article 
discusses issues of sexual assault 
and violations of consent in the 
media.
I’ve recently taken the plunge 
into the Netflix original series Elite, 
a Spanish demi-soap revolving 
around 
the 
indoctrination 
of 
public high school students into 
an exclusive private academy and 
the lives of their opulently wealthy 
classmates. 
Over 
the 
course 
of its current two seasons, the 
round table cast find themselves 
embroiled in the throes of a murder 
investigation, a concurrent missing 
person investigation, class and 
racial tensions, relationship drama, 
sex scandals and light incest (why 
not pepper it in, right?). In many 
ways, it uses similar tactics as its 
most obvious predecessor, Gossip 
Girl, to draw in its audience. While 
it isn’t the same kind of buzzy 
location and fashion behemoth, 
it certainly offers an imaginary, 
salacious peek into the lives of 
the young, rich and powerful-
-subsisting viewers with high-
stakes, high-drama plot lines that 
play on a simultaneous disgust and 
fascination with extreme privilege 
and the kinds of problems that 
might come with it. My primary 
interest in watching the show, of 
course, is its undeniable queerness 
(before actually watching the show 
in earnest I just fast forwarded to 
all of the gay stuff), but like Mikelle 
Street of Out before me, I couldn’t 
help but notice there were some 
sticky dynamics going on around 
issues of consent, as well as familial 
and partner relations. This isn’t to 
say that the show presented these 
dynamics as acceptable behavior 
or even that by enjoying the show 
one is somehow co-signing them, 
but they certainly fall in line with 
how queer relations are often 
represented in the media, especially 
in content that’s marketed towards 
young adults. 
Some of the issues that I’m 
referencing 
specifically 
have 
already been touched on and I 
worry about belaboring points 
that have already effectively been 

made, and those are the actions 
of 
a 
bi-questioning 
character 
named Polo (Álvaro Rico.) In the 
first season, Polo and his then-
girlfriend, Carla (Ester Expósito), 
begin a three-way relationship with 
one of the new students, Christian 
(Miguél Herràn), and enter into it 
by pursuing a cuckolding fantasy 
without expressly telling him what 
was happening. Later that season, 
he establishes an imbalance of 
power between Christian and 
himself by offering him a modeling 
gig, specifically the cover of his 
mothers’ fashion magazine, and 
then initiating oral sex with him 
after his photoshoot with the 
knowledge that Christian had not 
expressed any interest in having 
direct sexual relations with men. In 
season two, he pressures his friend, 
Ander (Arón Piper), into kissing 
him and exchanging handjobs 
in the same bed as their friend, 
Guzman 
(Miguel 
Bernardeau), 
who is passed out drunk. The first 
two situations were presented 
as something that wasn’t okay 
and that Polo had to answer for, 
and the third was used more as 
a scandalous foreshadowing tool 
for a dynamic between the three 
that would slowly unfold over the 
course of season two. Without 
spoiling anything, Polo’s sexual 
behavior can easily be seen as a tie 
in to his violent and sociopathic 
tendencies, and his actions are 
by no means put on a pedestal by 
the show, but I have complicated 
feelings about the intersection 
between budding queerness and 
violation being treated so often as 
an easy access point in seemingly 
progressive storytelling.
For 
one 
thing, 
the 
show 
brings up some very meaningful 
conversations around what consent 
means and what it means to violate 
it. Across the board, the show very 
aptly colors in several shades of 
gray in what is often treated as a 
subject involving only extremes. 
Sexual assault is usually portrayed 
as an overwhelming display of 
physical violence, or as the old, 
powerful boss attempting to coerce 
the new, unsuspecting employee, 
and not as something that can 
happen between people who know 
each other well, in a way that 

involves more subtle methods of 
coercion, coming from people that 
might not understand (and, often 
times not be willing to understand) 
that what they’re doing is harmful. 
The show goes a long way to show 
that people have to learn how to ask 
for it and give it, to set boundaries, 
that it can take people time to 
realize that their consent has been 
violated, and that bringing it up 
can be even more difficult when 
the playing field isn’t even. Taking 
an extremely sensitive topic and 
showing how a conflict regarding it 
might play out in a youth-oriented 
context is sure to help create 
internal dialogues about how it 
might apply to one’s life in a way 
that is, well, groundbreaking. 
Any form of media that has the 
smallest 
potential 
of 
helping 
people advocate for themselves or, 
conversely, reflect on their actions 
with that subject matter is one I 
eagerly support.
Yet, my issue stems from the fact 
that there are very few narratives 
revolving around queer sex that 
don’t involve an all encompassing 
kind of existential pain, let alone 
some kind of violation of consent, 
either contained within the act 
itself or by who has knowledge 
of it. Even in Modern Family, 
often considered a marvel of 
social engineering for essentially 
sanitizing a queer relationship 
through the lens of an American 
nuclear family, only ever hinted at 
their two gay characters, Cam (Eric 
Stonestreet) and Mitchell (Jesse 
Tyler Ferguson), having sex on one 
occasion when they were being 
walked in on by Cam’s parents 
(which, if I remember correctly, 
was a point of contention in the 
episode). In Gossip Girl, the most 
noteworthy on-screen kiss was the 
result of Blair (Leighton Meester)’s 
scheming, 
manipulating 
her 
boyfriend, Chuck (Ed Westwick) 
into kissing a faculty member 
of NYU without his express 
knowledge. The only other same 
sex kiss in the show was in an 
episode that treated public outing 
as a punch line. 

SAMUEL KREMKE
Daily Style Columnist

REPUBLIC RECORDS

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