WTF

March Fadness 2017 is brought to you by the team who brought March Sadness to you in March 2016.

Each year we stage a 64-team, March-Madness-style tournament of songs. In 2016 it was March Sadness, in which we pitted the saddest songs of the college rock era/genre against each other. Writers assess and argue for each song, and each day in March we play the games, winner determined by a popular vote here on the blog and on the March Fadness twitter. The winner advances, until we determine a winner by month's end. 

In 2017 March Fadness features one-hit wonders of the 1990s pitted against each other in ridiculous and possibly pointless games, all in search of understanding the 1990s and its culture as well as the uses and failures of memory. A winner will be crowned. 

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METHODOLOGY FOR 2017:

Songs for the tourney proper (excluding play-ins) must be by artists who have one and only one US Top 40 hit. Songs are seeded according to highest chart position (so the top seeds hit #1, whereas the lower seeds may have hit as low as #40). 

However, since some songs didn't quite qualify on these merits but we felt should be included (Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" topped out at #41, incredibly, whereas Snow had another "hit" beyond "Informer"—"Girl I've Been Hurt" hit #19), The Committee added play-in games for these essential songs to make the tournament if you, the listener/viewer/reader, deem them worthy.

We also tried to omit songs not really in the spirit of the tournament. So, for instance, though Concrete Blonde's "Joey" hit #19, Faith No More's "Epic" hit #9, and The Cardigans' "Lovefool" hit #2, they're omitted by virtue of their impressive careers/bodies of work (also all three of these songs are great). They should not, in The Committee's view, be considered proper one-hit-wonders. Ditto Sinead O'Connor, who apparently only had one US Top 40 hit ("Nothing Compares 2 U").