Thank you to everyone who participated in the nominations. I shouldn’t be surprised that we have such a diversity of musical passion here, or that you guys love some pretty obscure bands (I gave Wikipedia a good workout to make sure the ones I was less familiar with still fit within the rules of the tournament).
Hopefully I’ve sufficiently buttered you all up, because here’s the part where you all get pissed off at me.
Killing Me Softly
With well over 300 total nominations, I had more than enough to make a bracket of 256 bands. But I decided to do a bracket of 128 instead.
Ouch. Believe me, I know. This means a ton of awesome bands didn’t make the cut (more on that in a moment).
The reason I made this decision is that, looking over the nominations and how the tournament is seeded, the vast majority of those bottom 128 bands would be crushed when paired with the top 128 bands. I would spend a week putting up brackets where probably 90-95% of those bottom 128 would lose anyway, so I decided to just eliminate them right off the bat.
My apologies to Frank Zappa, The Moody Blues, The Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Skynyrd, ELP, Cat Stevens, Carly Simon, Deep Purple, The B-52s, Nick Drake, Kool and the Gang, Alice Cooper, Santana, Yoko Ono, 10cc, Tangerine Dream, Sonny and Cher, Amon Düül II, War, Gong, UK, The Tubes, Traffic, Peter Frampton, and many other awesome, talented artists. If only you all had made better albums, you would be in the tournament.
The Bitch Is Back
- The thorniest issue for me to untangle was that Parliament, Funkadelic, and P-Funk all received enough votes to make it into the tournament. The whole P-Funk collective is a tangled mush of releases, so I decided to enter Parliament and Funkadelic as separate entries. I took P-Funk out and distributed the unique votes among the other two bands, because George Clinton did not start releasing albums under the “P-Funk” label until the 80s. I think this is fair.
- I eliminated the Beatles from contention. exexalien gave a convincing argument: “if the other tournaments are any indication, people will vote for them simply because they’ve heard of them or like them, and not based on the quality of their sole 1970 album that was recorded in the sixties.”
- oh vienna nominated “Gary Numan (Tubeway Army)”. They would be eligible as separate entries, but this single entry got enough votes to make it in, so I’m just going to leave it like this.
- Nineteen bands were tied for 128th place. I get to break the tie, because I say so: congratulations Paul Williams, you have won the opportunity to get obliterated by David Bowie in round one!
Once I get this first set of brackets listed, I will post a Gripes thread to collect your insults and abuse. It’s all groovy!
This round will end on Tuesday at 8am PST, at which point your upvotes will be counted and Round 1 Part 2 will be posted soon afterwards. Downvote if you like, but only upvotes will be counted.
[Header Photo: Peter Gabriel performing with Genesis, circa 1972. Gabriel left the band in 1975 after their 102-date concert tour supporting their double-LP masterpiece, “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway”.]