Rate An Album: A Very Different March Madness

The Sweet Sixteen

Photo by author

The NCAA Basketball Tournament (better known as March Madness) is set to begin, and millions around the country will be filling out brackets that will surely be busted after the first round. I used to follow college basketball religiously, but as I grew older I grew progressively disinterested, to the point that I rarely even watch the final game anymore. What I have never lost interest in is music, and over the next four weeks I will be adapting the March Madness bracket thing as a variation of my Rate-A-Record series.

However, I’m not doing a bracket of songs. In honor of my newly rediscovered record collecting obsession, this version of March Madness will focus on albums. To add an extra degree of difficulty, you need to consider not just the music, but how iconic the album cover is as well. That means I have not included either Metallica’s Black Album or the Beatles White Album in the Sweet Sixteen; great as they are, the album covers are boring. I have included a well-known song from the album with the cover as the YouTube image.

I’m starting with the Sweet Sixteen rather than 68 teams that begin the NCAA Tournament because I’m only doing one round per week. Also given the nature of this “tournament,” we will not be using the classic Terry Barr/American Bandstand rating system of…