#46 The Best Album of 2000 Tournament Starts Monday! Oh My God It’s Happening!
Hey folks!
That’s right, it’s finally happening. The Best Album of 2000 Tournament is starting this Monday, August 19th, at, oh, let’s say 10am CST for now. (I know for the runoff tournament I complained that it started too late, and readjusted to 9am, but let’s try it at 10am for a week.)
The first match will be seed #1 Outkast, STANKONIA vs seed #128 Compulsive Gamblers, CRYSTAL GAZING LUCK AMAZING. We will still be using Google Forms for this — it’s not the greatest solution, at least on my end, but it gets the job done with some good safeguards in effect. If we’re lucky, by the time of the next tournament, Bluesky will have a (good) polling system in place.
So, for the next five days, expect an email reminder and a link to the latest Best Album tournament poll, as well as reminders and links on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky acccount. (In case you hadn’t heard, anyone can make an account on Bluesky now. Follow me there!)
Here’s this week’s schedule:
Monday, Aug. 19: #1 Outkast vs #128 Compulsive Gamblers
Tuesday, Aug. 20: #64 Mary Timony vs #65 Eels
Wednesday, Aug. 21: #32 Bright Eyes vs #97 Quasimoto
Thursday, Aug. 22: #33 Death Cab for Cutie vs #96 The Cure
Friday, Aug. 23: #16 Grandaddy vs #113 Animal Collective
If you’d like to get a head start on the tournament, you can listen to STANKONIA here on Spotify or here on YouTube, and you can listen to CRYSTAL GAZING LUCK AMAZING here on Spotify or here on YouTube.
One last thing: Designated Cheerleaders! In case you don’t know, Designated Cheerleaders are little essays or longish blurbs written in support of albums in the tournament. I don’t have any as of now, but send them in, and I’ll publish them here in the newsletter. (I did this for the runoff tournament, so go through the archive if you’d like to see some examples.) No word minimum or maximum, just write what you feel.
Okay, that’s it for now. This journey from Twitter to where we are now began around October 22, 2023, so it’s been almost a year. Thank you for following and sticking with me for that time while I tried to figure out a way to make this work without Twitter. Best Album doesn’t exist without you.
Thanks again,
Kent