WTF
March Shredness 2018 is the latest edition of the baddest literary music single-elimination NCAA-style 64-essay competition around, featuring the best and worst of classic hair metal.
It is broughtto you by the team who brought you March Fadness (90s One Hit Wonders) in 2017 and March Sadness (Best/Saddest Songs of the College Rock Era) in 2016.
Each year we stage a 64-team, March-Madness-style tournament of songs. Writers assess and riff on and argue for (or in some cases against) 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 Shredness twitter. The winner advances, until we determine a winner by month's end.
In 2018 March Fadness features the best/worst hair metal songs from 1983-1991 pitted against each other in ridiculous and possibly pointless games, all in search of understanding the era and its culture as well as the uses and failures of memory. A winner will be crowned.
see also how to play
METHODOLOGY FOR 2018 under construction below:
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").