As we wrote yesterday, bracket season is upon us once more here at The Barking Crow, and as is our custom, we’ll begin with the latest iteration of what started with the 90’s Bangers Bracket.
To recap the last three years:
- In 2020, the 90’s Bangers Bracket—the brainchild of longtime follower and onetime Lyft passenger Chris—brought joy to many in the broader The Barking Crow community during the early months of Covid. Semi-Charmed Life took the crown, edging All the Small Things in the championship.
- In 2021, the 2000’s Bangers Bracket was marred by controversy and subterfuge. Someone or someones calling themselves Mr. Darkside aggressively voted against Mr. Brightside, brazenly breaking the one rule we have, which is: “Be cool.” Everytime We Touch ended up defeating Mr. Brightside in the championship, and we think that was the will of the people, but it was hard to tell because Mr. Darkside resorted to buying Instagram votes from a bot service and also cast upwards of one thousand votes in the Google Form. We had a chat with Mr. Darkside during this—though we still don’t know their legal identity—and they tried using the excuse that in the first round, others had responded to their vote-stuffing with vote-stuffing of their own, but…Mr. Darkside started this. Mr. Darkside is a bad person or persons.
- In 2022, Bangers III (2010-2014) went off without a hitch, except that we discovered we’d left TiK ToK out of the 2000’s Bangers Bracket by mistake, which may have been responsible for Mr. Darkside’s rise. Similarly to how American foreign policy failures in Iraq begat ISIS, it may have been our mistake that led to Mr. Darkside’s emergence. Thankfully, Bangers III was plagued by neither controversy nor subterfuge. Call Me Maybe won it all.
This year, we’re running another music bracket to kick things off, but we don’t know which music bracket to run. We’re rapidly catching up to ourselves historically, and the nostalgia that’s driven much of these brackets’ success is at risk of wearing off. As we see it, we have three options, and we’re going to ask you to vote on those three options today.
Option 1: 80’s Bops
This bracket would simply be a collection of the 64 best bops of the 1980’s. Why not bangers? We think for something to be a banger, you have to experience it yourself, in the moment, and the majority of our followers are younger than 40, meaning they’ve only experienced 80’s music in a throwback setting. It’s a slight difference, but we think it’s important.
Option 2: Bangers IV – Deep Cuts
This bracket would be a collection of the best bangers not included in the previous three years of brackets. TiK ToK would of course make the list, but the rest would be an assortment of bangers from 1990 through 2014 which didn’t make our original fields.
Option 3: Bangers IV – All-Star Bangers
This bracket would be a collection of 21 bangers from the 90’s Bangers Bracket, 21 bangers from the 2000’s Bangers Bracket, and 21 bangers from Bangers III (2010-14). It would also include TiK ToK.
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Because there are three options here, we can’t do a binary poll. So, what we’ll do instead is ask you to vote in a round robin of polls. Whether you vote on the Google Form or in our Instagram stories, we’ll ask you to choose between Option 1 & Option 2, then choose between Option 1 & Option 3, then choose between Option 2 & Option 3. The option with the most votes wins, and will be our first bracket this year.
We aren’t using Twitter polls this year because that feature is going away for users not paying for Twitter, a subset which includes us.
Without further ado, then:
Here’s the link to the Google Form.
Here’s the link to our Instagram account.
Voting will conclude when the Instagram stories expire, or roughly at 12:30 PM EDT tomorrow, Wednesday April 5th.
