It's Musical March Madness! The sprawling bracket — both a parody and a tribute to the NCAA basketball tournament, masterminded by MTV News' James Montgomery — takes the 65 biggest names in rock, splits them up into four regions, assigns them seeds and puts them up against one another in a single-elimination series of match-ups in a winner-take-all contest. We're leaving it to you to decide an actual champ in this field of 65. Over the next few weeks, we will present a series of polls that will allow you to vote for the match-ups presented in MTV News' Band Bracketology. You vote for the winners, we'll keep advancing the seeds and, in the end, we'll have some sort of champion. What will the winner receive? Little more than our esteem (as well as that of the fans) and some Internet bragging rights.
The final pairings in the West bracket feature a quartet of groups slugging it out and looking for supremacy. This will be the last set of match-ups for the weekend, but we'll keep plowing through the first round on Monday, March 22.
(8) Modest Mouse vs. (9) 30 Seconds to Mars
One of the most balanced games in the entire first round. Each have a healthy level of experience and work ethic, and they both show astonishing consistency with the ability to explode at any time. Either one could get away with being called the Larry Bird of rock music, but which one will advance?
(1) Blink-182 vs. (16) Angels & Airwaves
Blink-182 are riding high on a phenomenally well-received reunion tour and are hard at work on a new album, while Angels & Airwaves have the recently-released free (and excellent) album Love on their side. Of course, this one is sort of a cheat, because Tom DeLonge can't lose here. But only one of his projects can move on, so which one will it be?