WTF

March Danceness 00s Edition is the 2024 edition of a series of basketball-style tournaments of music, culture, and memory. It’s a competitive literary/music tournament that runs each March. It’s sports for people who don’t get sports. It’s writing about music done like gods.

Each year has its own theme and (typically) decade. The 2024 edition is March Danceness, 00s Edition, a tournament of dance songs from the 2000s (2000-2009). Our previous tournaments are all archived above. You can read all of the great essays all the way back to 2016’s March Sadness.

Each year the Official March Xness Selection Committee makes a longlist of essential songs that we think represent the heart of what we’re trying to get at. 64 writers are selected by lottery to choose a song from the longlist (or another one they prefer, as long as it satisfies the inclusion criteria), and they write an essay about the song in whatever way they like. People submit brackets before the tourney plays in March. Then in March we play the tournament, with one song/essay combo against one song/essay combo each game, decided by 24 hours of voting. The winner advances. The loser goes home. We continue until there is only one standing: THE CHAMPION.

The champions of previous tournaments:

Who will prevail this year? You will decide.

The winner is what we’re after, but the journey and the difficult decisions are the real important part of this endeavor. To that end you can—and should!—read all the essays archived under each year’s tournament. There’s some brilliant writing and thinking in there. Consider playing past tournaments out with only you or someone you love or maybe are just interested in as the deciders, and see where it takes you.

Plus we have more original ESSAYS, POEMS, and VIDEOS relating to our current or previous Xness themes. Hit em up above.

How do you get to write for the tournament? Great question. The tournament spots are determined by lottery every August, so get your name in there (link in the main menu above) to be considered. Or pitch us an extracurricular essay (an essay about a song not in the tournament, or about something closely or tangentially related). We publish these all fall and sometimes post-tourney on the current year’s theme.

We also have a waitlist in case folks bail later, too, so you can get on that if you miss the draft.

You probably want to sign up for the email list via substack (below or above).

Signed, The March Xness Selection Committee

THE OFFICIAL MARCH XNESS SELECTION COMMITTEE:

ander monson and megan campbell

Ander Monson edits DIAGRAM, New Michigan Press, and Essay Daily, among other projects.  / Megan Campbell runs Bad Cholla Vintage, for your vintage clothing needs. 

The Britney Spears Subcommittee for March Danceness 00s Edition:

laura c. j. owen and clint mccall

Content Editors:

Raquel Gutiérrez & Gabriel Palacios

Raquel Gutiérrez was first introduced to the politics of space when in 5th grade got dropped off at the Music Plus in Lakewood, California to stand in line for Guns 'N' Roses tickets only to realize she was a different kind of fan. A former life involved working for a Soundscan competitor back in the pre-MP3 days and now Gutiérrez is a poet and essayist pursuing her MFA degree in poetry at the University of Arizona. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she writes about space and institutionality and publishes chapbooks by queers of color with the tiny press Econo Textual Objects, established in 2014. Her work has found homes in FENCE, Zócalo Public Square, ASAP Journal, Huizache, The Portland Review, Los Angeles Weekly, and Entropy. She received an MA in Performance Studies from New York University and a BA in Journalism and Central American Studies from California State University at Northridge.

Gabriel Palacios is a poet and musician from Tucson, where he is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arizona. His poems study the present-day imprints of colonial violence in the region of southern Arizona and northern Mexico known in the Spanish Colonial era as the Pimería Alta. The voyeuristic shortcomings of the work itself usually surfaces as a second subject. At ten he begged his parents to buy him a Skid Row T-shirt bearing a cartoon image of the Mona Lisa in tattoos and a nose-chain. “IT AIN’T ART IT’S ROCK ’N’ ROLL,” the shirt declared.