Music Madness 2010: Intro,. Preview, and Play-Ins

Ignoring the fact that I'm too old to stay up till midnight on a work night, the NCAA Men's tournament that just concluded was by far the most invigorating and entertaining of my lifetime. Of all the years I've dove into March Madness, be it cutting high school, skipping college classes or taking sick days and vacations in my professional life, I've never seen anything like it. The right balance of underdogs and juggernauts. The buzzer-beaters and new heroes. The rise of Butler and the fall of Callipari. These last three weeks were a sports fan's prime rib buffet with all-you-can-drink Guinness. I don't want it to end.

So I'm going to stay in tournament mode.

On a recent commute, I started thinking about what would happen if I were to come up with 64 musicians and seeded them. How would it play out? What would be the criteria? Would it be a pointless waste of time to decide that Bob Dylan was my favorite artist of all time? Yeah, it might be. Then it dawned on me, hell, there's nothing I enjoy more than a good old fashioned waste of time, so who gives a Bush's ass? It was decided that yes indeed, it was time to study the iPod and form a one man selection committee and come up with what I would consider to be my 64 favorite acts of all time (though I limited it to post-WWII genres).

Actually it became 68. I figure  the NCAA has a play-in game for the 16th seed, I'll have 4 of them for each sixteener. I seeded the teams - loosely to a degree - based off what I perceive to be my personal preferences, then randomly assigned them to a region. For good measure, the region was named after the 1 seed's actual or adoptive hometown.

The Number One Seeds:
Liverpool Region: The Beatles
The Village Region: Bob Dylan
Charlottesville Region: Dave Matthews Band
San Francisco Region: The Grateful Dead


The next step was to determine a list of criteria. I didn't want to go "Well, I like Public Enemy more than Smashing Pumpkins, so they move on". Afterall, if that was the case the whole thing would have been done the minute I finished seeding them all. I wanted something comprehensive and tangible to have an artist defeat an artist. I like tangible explanations, not a fan of "just because" as you probably know by now.

I came up with a scoreboard with 5 Criteria, worth a total of 9 points to ensure no ties:

• Entire Collection (3 Points): Lined up against each other, who has a better collection overall.
• Defining Album (2 Points): If you take each artists' best work, which is better. I'm going to try and make it a blend of personal choice and conventional wisdom. They don't always agree. But once an album is settled on for each artist, that will be the album that they have for the entire tournament.
• Personal Connection and Memories (2 Points): The most subjective criteria of them all and the most random. I'm curious to see how this plays out during this colosal waste of time. It's also the reason I didn't include Meat Loaf.
• Defining Song (1 Point): Same as album, on a smaller scale.
• Historical Impact (1 Point): Which artist has made a bigger impact on music history and our culture as a whole? It's probably the most objective of them all. Regardless of the other criteria, you can't argue that Billy Joel has had a bigger impact than Sublime. However, it's only 1 point and that shouldn't dramatically alter anything.

As with any tournament, honorable mention must be given to the bubble teams that didn't quite make the field, so pour yourself a pint and toast to Madonna, Garth Brooks, James Taylor, Meat Loaf, and Def Leppard. While we're at it, some fan favorites that The Committee is thoroughly unimpressed with include Coldplay, Sting/The Police, The Eagles, and Michael Jackson.

Let the Games Begin:
The Village Regional Play In Game: Skid Row vs Barenaked Ladies.
A true nailbiter between two vastly different acts with very similar qualities. Both fit the popular mold of a late decade genre, BNL with 90s fluff-rock and Skid Row with 80s hair-metal. The Ladies won for their Entire Collection, primarily because after Skid Row's self-titled debut,  their follow-up album, Slave to the Grind rivaled child abuse on the Despicable Chart. BNL also captured Defining Song with "One Week" over "Youth Gone Wild". Yes, I'm ashamed to admit that. However that was all the Canadians could muster, as Skid Row took home Defining Album (Skid Row over Stunt), Personal Connection (I had a 6 foot long poster of them on my closet, as entertaining as the 1999 BNL concert on Long Island was), and Historical Impact, cause well, hair metal rules.
FINAL SCORE: SKID ROW 5 ~ BARENAKED LADIES 4.
Congrats Sebastian, you get to get your ass whooped by Dylan.

Liverpool Regional Play In Game: Kings of Leon vs Warrant
The Committeerespected glam rock in terms of their right to be in the dance, but Warrant makes it two members of the hairband conference that had to play an extra round just to be a 16 seed. KoL took down Entire Collection (easily - a big weakness for the hair bands), Defining Album, and Historical Impact (cause we don't count Jani Lane's appearance on Celebrity Fat Farm). Giving Warrant points for Song (Heaven) and Personal Connection (Mad respect for 1989) wasn't enough.
FINAL SCORE: KINGS OF LEON 6 ~ WARRANT 3


Charlottesville Regional Play In Game: Incubus v Queen
Incubus won the Album category by virtue of "Light Grenades" beating anything Queen had to offer (outside of their Greatest, there's nothing that jumps out at me) but the jolly flamboyant men of Queen ran the table everywhere else. I expected this to be closer.
FINAL SCORE: QUEEN 7 ~ INCUBUS 2

San Francisco Regional Play In Game: Modest Mouse vs Smashing Pumpkins
Proving to me that the criteria will make things interesting. If you stopped me on the street and asked me to pick between these two, I'd probably say "God that Billy Corgan is a stupid self-serving prick, and I enjoy me some MM". But the box score says something different. Mouse's Good News... won the Defining Album, but the Pumpkins have the collection, the connection (fun, not so innocent times driving around when I was 17), the song ("Disarm") and unfortunately, the impact. A shocking personal upset and a bloodbath:
FINAL SCORE: SMASHING PUMPKINS 7 ~ MODEST MOUSE 2

Now that we have our 64, here's the Full Bracket

I look forward to wasting many, many more hours on this.

My 30 Best Albums of the Decade: 25-21

Though not on the list, I'd like to give an honorary award to the Dixie Chicks. I tried convincing myself that they were good, but they're really not. Still, anyone who annoys tiny dick Sean Hannity gets some kudos.

#25: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb - U2: This is where U2 and I finally got on the same page. When I first really started getting into music, circa 1987, I didn't like U2 cause they didn't sing about boobs or cars, they were "grown up rock" and at the time that was quite a turnoff. Though in the years that followed, I learned that "Grown Up" wasn't bad, it just happened to be that Grown-ups when I was younger were all Baby Boomers, and well, yeah, they were bad. When I was 16 or 17 and finally got into classic U2 like Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum the band had done a 180 and got all technopoppy with their Zooropa crap. But here, Atomic Bomb, they returned to their roots and I was over the boobs and boomers and ready to enjoy. They lose points however, for the most annoying intro of the decade: Uno, Dos, Tres, Catorce.

#24: In Between Dreams - Jack Johnson: Ever have a song that makes you hungry? That's what Banana Pancakes, track #3 here, does for me every time. To the point that I'm smelling banana pancakes. I think I need to play this song every time I wake up on a Saturday craving McDonald's breakfast, kill the crave and lower the cholesterol. This album rotates back and forth between a great rainy day, chill on the porch album, and a beautiful sunny day, pilsner on the deck CD. Sure, it's got some songs that can get stuck in your head and drive you nuts, in particularly Staple It Together and Situations, which unfortunately are back to back, but that makes them easier to skip. Any way you look at it though, this album really makes you wish you had Jack Johnson's life. Freakin Hawaiians man, they got it all figured out.

#23: Stand Up - Dave Matthews Band: Full disclaimer: This is the decade where Dave Matthews replaced Jesus in my life so I may skew a little more in his favor than others. Conversely, I also may hold him to a higher standard, so as far as Stand Up is concerned, we'll let it settle right here at good old number 23. Is it DMB's best? Not by a long shot. It doesnt rank among his first three classic full-length releases or another disc that will likely appear on this countdown. But it's the best of the rest. Louisiana Bayou is an instant classic, and you just have to love American Baby - a song that got so popular that the magnetic-ribbon-frat-boys didn't even realize he was making fun of them as they were going apeshit when he played it at concerts. And of course, the dual State of the Union tracks: Out of My Hands and Everybody Wake Up. You'll see as the countdown moves along, I give brownie points to those musicians who told it like it was in the mid-oughts.

#22: Only By The Night - Kings of Leon: Let me get this out of the way immediately: some that I've spoken to swear Aha Shake Heartbreak is the Kings' best release of the decade. I don't disagree, however, as I was getting into it, there was a computer/upload/copywright snafu of sorts that wiped it off my system and I havent replaced it yet. So I can't sit here and put it in perspective when I don't have an honest perspective to put it in, that would be disingenuous. Now that that's cleared up, despite the fact that the word "Somebody" is overused, abused and over-exagerated on this album, simply put - it delivers. It took a while to distinguish itself in my eyes from their previous release Because of the Times but I was also very, very late to the Kings of Leon shindig so really, take my opinion for what its worth. You want an album to put on for a road trip, well this has an Allman Brothers Band-like quality for that purpose: the tempo picks up comfortably (without causing palipatations) and mellows down, but never too down, even on some of the slower-paced tracks. I give it one of my highest compliments: Good Shit.

#21. Light Grenades - Incubus: Now here's a band who's career completely passed me by. When I went on my music gathering binge in 2006, I came across this album and a previous one, Morning View. I have no idea what's considered by "experts" to be the better of the two, but when I would play Music->Artists->Incubus->ALL - I found that most of the tracks I preferred were off of Light Grenades - in particularly Ana Molly - a classic "What Coulda Been" ode to a fallen chick, along the same lines of The Ballad of Jane and Fly High Michelle. And that's good enough for me. The album as a whole seems like a counter-argument to most of the rock produced in the 90s: "My life sucks, come join my pity party and let's die". The overall vibe I get from Light Grenades is "Life Sucks, Wear a Helmet" - a much healthier perspective if you ask me.