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March 15, 2012 2:34 PM   Subscribe

It being bracket season, The Weather Channel has devised an epic Weather Song tournament for those not interested in college athletics. It consists of four weather-related phenomena, with underdogs and favorites abounding. "Have you Ever Seen the Rain" trounced "the crowd-favorite Weather Girls' It's Raining Men" in the first round of the Rain Region. Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" upset Bananarama's summer-related hit in the Seasons Region. Voting is still open until tomorrow for round two of the Sun and Elements regions.
posted by obscurator (39 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Where's the Bracket tournament of Top 10 Lists of Best Brackets?
posted by kmz at 2:45 PM on March 15, 2012


Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that an interest in college athletics interferes with or precludes one from enjoying TWC's contest...
posted by obscurator at 2:45 PM on March 15, 2012


So "Rain" by the Beatles doesn't make the Bracket?
posted by holdkris99 at 3:04 PM on March 15, 2012


No "November Rain?" C'mon!
posted by dismas at 3:21 PM on March 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


There are some glaring omissions here, but I find it most interesting that their divisions actually mean something, whereas other mock-brackets I've seen (like the one for The Wire characters) just make a joke about how meaningless they are in the actual NCAA tourney.
posted by Navelgazer at 3:26 PM on March 15, 2012


Elton John over Lena Horne in the first round? Bad beat.
posted by ctmf at 3:37 PM on March 15, 2012




Shocking lack of Crowded House! No "Weather With You"? No "Four Seasons In One Day"? No "Distant Sun"? Well, they were a two-hit wonder in yonder States, weren't they? *fires up iTunes*
posted by kariebookish at 3:41 PM on March 15, 2012


"Summer in the City" is the clear winner in the Seasons one. Might as well hand the trophy over now.
posted by Sys Rq at 4:01 PM on March 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Brackets are great because we might not have HTML without them.
posted by GavinR at 4:45 PM on March 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


No Rainy Night in Georgia? That's just SO wrong. What the hell is with Americans not knowing their cultural heritage? Shame!

So "Rain" by the Beatles doesn't make the Bracket?

Yes, seriously, that one should be tops if only because rain is not some side theme in the song, there to complement the main idea of love or loneliness or loss or whatever. Lennon's "Rain" is the only song in the bunch (or rather, that should be in the bunch) that's really just straight up *about* rain.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:07 PM on March 15, 2012


Splash!
posted by Sys Rq at 5:12 PM on March 15, 2012


Oh man, you need a whole bracket just for Summertime Blues.

You forgot Rush.
posted by hippybear at 5:53 PM on March 15, 2012


OH man hippybear, what is this thing of which you speak?!

and here I was all worried about the Weather Girls, injustice, grumble grumble dance yer gay ass off
posted by wallabear at 6:10 PM on March 15, 2012


OH man hippybear, what is this thing of which you speak?!

Perhaps you're not familiar with Rush's Feedback album, a collection of songs which the bands says were influential during their important formative years. It's quite a little grouping of songs. I've seen them do Summertime Blues live, and it was awesome.

New Rush album available for pre-order now, released at the end of May. Rumors are it will include a 5.1 surround mix. SOOO looking forward to it.
posted by hippybear at 6:18 PM on March 15, 2012


IF you ever get the opportunity to lift a Rush fan's wallet, their ATM code is 2112.
posted by rocket88 at 6:30 PM on March 15, 2012 [4 favorites]


My brother's punk band did a pretty good version of 'Windy' by The Association.

"...and she has storms in her eyes..."
posted by ovvl at 6:35 PM on March 15, 2012


"And Windy has stormy eyes
that flash at the sound of lies"

I love The Association. I think I saw some local PBS thing which said one of the original members lives in my neck of the woods, but I can't remember which one and where.
posted by hippybear at 6:44 PM on March 15, 2012


No "Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain"?

Back when Heather Tesch, Nicole Mitchell, and Alexandra Steele were doing the TWC morning shift, I heard them refer to themselves as "the Weather Girls" once. They did not, however, ever forecast a rain of men, as far as I know. (Only Jim Cantore in the rain.)
posted by octobersurprise at 6:45 PM on March 15, 2012


You forgot Rush.

Deliberately. I worked in a graphics studio where we produced several of their album covers and I never ever want to hear another note of Rush as long as I live.

I was also tempted to torture people with Olivia Newton John, Rocapella, and Van Halen, but decided against it. Bon Jovi is pushing it far enough. And no bruce either.

Now I am having a hard time picking one out of that bracket. The sixties performances are incredible, I recall owning that Terry Reid single back in the day, and that Blue Cheer performance is insane. The Who's performances are legendary, there's a story that they were so high during the Live at Leeds that they swore they'd never do drugs while performing ever again. You either get the Flying Lizards, or you don't. Even the Buck Owens version has its own eccentric charm. The Levon Helm performance is a close runner up, beating the rest of the pack by a long mile.

But I came out of the bracket with the same favorite as before I created the bracket. And the winner is:

Joan Jett.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:46 PM on March 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


I worked in a graphics studio where we produced several of their album covers

More details are needed. Many many more details.
posted by hippybear at 6:48 PM on March 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


zeppelin got shafted at least twice here, with neither "Rain Song" nor "Fool in the Rain" represented.
posted by Navelgazer at 6:53 PM on March 15, 2012


Sometimes, including the Beatles as an option makes a choice less interesting.
posted by blue t-shirt at 7:28 PM on March 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Throw out all the songs where the hook is just a few familiar weather words, and where weather is actually meaningful in the song, and you'll have a meaningful contest. Otherwise, we might as well just be assembling a list of puns. "It's Raining Men"? Give me a break.
posted by crapmatic at 7:31 PM on March 15, 2012


So will the "Sun" category include the Doors' "Waiting for the Sun"? (Has the craptastic patriot-bait line, "Standing there on Freedom's Shore"! ...God Bless Vespucci-land.)
posted by Philofacts at 7:32 PM on March 15, 2012


IF you ever get the opportunity to lift a Rush fan's wallet, their ATM code is 2112.

I'm not a Rush fan (Geddy Lee's voice = nails on a blackboard), but Geddy once gave the most practical bit of advice ever to aspiring young musicians: "Always take your wallet with you onstage."
posted by Philofacts at 7:39 PM on March 15, 2012


More details are needed. Many many more details.

You don't want to know. It's not like we worked with the band, or even heard the albums before anyone else. It's all graphics studio shit, like why is our compositor guy doing this project in ColorStudio instead of Photoshop, which is massively inconvenient since we all use Photoshop to do the prep work, and he's pissing everyone off by playing old Rush albums at high volume all day long to "get in the mood." And who is this idiot art director Hugh, who we have never seen, but everyone is pissed off at him, especially the photographer who seems to have deliberately fucked up the exposure on the photos, causing me personally all sorts of grief and extra work in drum scanning and color correction. And doesn't the photog know that to composite several images, the light sources all have to be coming from the same direction? And that the images all have to match in color temperature? Well of course he does, but somehow the AD pissed him off and he didn't bother with that and he's not going to do a reshoot if it means working with that idiot AD again. So now we have to fix all that shit, and make fake shadows and highlights on everything. In a stupid program ColorStudio that nobody uses but one guy on the whole planet. And at the end of it all, we have to put sole credit for the artwork to this idiot Hugh, who contributed absolutely nothing to this project except a vague idea and generous abuse that pissed off everyone who had to actually work directly with him to make his stupid idea into press-ready negatives.

Yeah, you really don't want to know the details. This is all the usual mundane, routine, irritating stuff in the graphics biz. At least Rush wasn't as bad a client as Megadeth.
posted by charlie don't surf at 7:42 PM on March 15, 2012


TL;DR - This is a better bracket then most pop culture brackets, which waste their time attempting to mimic seeding. But it fails like all of them do because it groups songs thematically, not realizing that the geographic grouping in the basketball tournament is mostly a lie.

I think this is a good bracket in that it doesn't make any pretense to understanding how seeding works. I've seen other pop culture brackets that at least reach this level and fail utterly.

[rant]The most offensive was the Muppet Character bracket, which I've seen before. If any character bracket was ripe for seeding, to end up with final confrontations of say, Kermit vs. Miss Piggy, it was that. Instead, the clueless jackals bracketed characters based on the show they were in, with the intention of having a bracket or two for newer characters who are lesser known to fight it out. Unfortunately, the characters who were best known, like those from the Muppet Show and Sesame Street, ended up fighting it out amongst themselves. They sort of pretended to seed them, but didn't get that either. What a waste.[/rant]

The Weather Channel is similar, but the nature of the themes mixes up songs from different genres, which are all fairly old anyway. I guess I'm still bitter at a waste of a good idea on the Muppets, from non-basketball fans who attempted to mimic the deeper constructs of basketball, but failed to realize that geographic divisions are mostly a lie, since it's mostly a way to keep top basketball teams close to their home campuses.
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:45 PM on March 15, 2012


Well, if we're going to talk Brackets, my favorite is Consumertist's Worse Company In America bracket, which actually has intelligently chosen first round picks and is based (more or less) on feedback by those who actually use the services of the companies duking it out for the "honor".
posted by hippybear at 7:53 PM on March 15, 2012


Grrr. WORST Company In America.
posted by hippybear at 7:58 PM on March 15, 2012


"Have you ever seen the rain?" is not "Who'll stop the rain?", the more awesomer of the two CCR rain-related songs, IMHO.
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:45 PM on March 15, 2012


"Summer in the City" is the clear winner in the Seasons one. Might as well hand the trophy over now.

I know! That song FEELS like what it's about. The verses are hot, pounding, bright urban days contrasting with the cool gentle-breeze evenings of the chorus. I've never tired of the craftsmanship and artistry of that song.
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:48 PM on March 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Clearly, the [NCAA Men's Basketball|Weather Channel Song] Tournament needs to be expanded to 96 entries.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 6:53 AM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


Where's Kentucky Rain? Because it's march madness brackets, and there has to be a Kentucky entry.
posted by Mcable at 6:56 AM on March 16, 2012 [2 favorites]


You realize that Somewhere Over the Rainbow is going to take it all, don't you?
posted by magstheaxe at 8:09 AM on March 16, 2012


Purple Rain wins it all, if there's any justice. Of course, they didn't include Tupelo.
posted by Kafkaesque at 1:43 PM on March 16, 2012


Kafkaesque: Purple Rain wins it all, if there's any justice.

I wish. It's losing to James Taylor's Fire and Rain, which is just wrong. I do like that CCR's Who'll Stop The Rain is up against CCR's Have You Ever Seen The Rain?.

The Woot March Angriness bracket is pretty entertaining. The regions are Technology/Internet, Pop Culture, Politics, and Etiquette.
posted by bluesapphires at 3:53 PM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


Just realized something that bugs me about a lot of these brackets.

The geographic designation of the regions in the NCAA basketball tournaments are pretty meaningless: teams are not placed in regions according to their geographic locality (except perhaps the #1 seeds, but even that's subject to limitations based on who the four #1s are), nor are the location of the early round games coordinated with the geographic designation of the region (although apparently the regional rounds are). Arguably, this is a feature, not a bug: it makes matchups between teams that didn't play in the regular season more likely in the early rounds of the tournament. You wouldn't want to put all the Big Ten teams that qualify in the Midwest region, or else you'd get a lot of first- and second-round matchups between Big Ten teams who had already played in the regular season.

But in these other brackets, nearly everyone seems to be treating categorically alike things as regions, so you get 16 or 17 entrants out of each of four categories.

I think it would be more entertaining, and also a better analogy to the actual NCAA tournaments, to treat categorically alike things as conferences rather than as regions. So you can have maybe about six major conferences that get anywhere from 4 to 8 entrants, some mid-majors that get 1 to 3, and minor conferences that get automatic bids - one entrant even if that entrant wouldn't be in the top 64 or 68 if you just ranked them top to bottom. (The 68 teams that get into the men's NCAA basketball tournament generally aren't the best 68 teams in the country, either, due to automatic bids.) Then distribute entrants from the same conference across different regions, rather than clustering them into a single region.

Or maybe I'm just annoyed to see Po-Boy vs. Lobster Roll as a first round matchup (in a reduced tournament with only 16 entries), when that's really a Final Four-caliber game.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:01 AM on March 28, 2012


The geographic designation of the regions used to make more sense a couple of decades ago, when there was some geographic relationship between opening round sites and regional sites. That was undone partially because of the greater number of potential sites east of the Mississippi. This also allows for more teams to play closer to home, making travel more affordable for more fans.

However, a point of keeping conference teams apart initially in the tournament is keeping the teams that have larger fanbases viable for as long as possible in the tournament. This means more tourist dollars from more visiting fans, plus higher ratings and more advertising dollars from network TV. This is effectively done both by region seed and by the NCAA also ranking teams from #1-#64.

The top seeds and top ranked teams have larger fanbases, and are generally favored in most of their matchups. They're more likely to go further in the tournament, and keep fan and viewer attention. Basically, the whole NCAA tournament is designed to maximize TV ratings.

Where most pop culture tournaments mess up is that they focus on the categorical relationship of items within a bracket, without realizing that the NCAA tournament isn't about that. If all my favorite Muppets come from the Muppet Show, and they're all jammed in one bracket, I'm not going to stick around after Miss Piggy decimates Kermit to become Queen of the Muppets, because I don't care about the winner of Fraggle Rock, random Movie Muppets, or the ultimate Sesame Street survivor.
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:39 AM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]


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