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.
It's time to vote on the other set of parings from the second round in the East bracket. In case you missed the first round, check out the summary of round one and the preview for round two. Tomorrow we'll address the West and Midwest brackets, where upsets abound and more are coming.
(4) Vampire Weekend vs. (5) Phoenix
Another high-powered indie tilt, as Vampire Weekend try to take their big win over Pavement into the second round. Phoenix defeated the National handily, but do they have enough support to drive into the Sweet 16?
(8) Radiohead vs. (16) Tokio Hotel
The top-seeded bands had a very turbulent first round, as only Blink-182 managed to survive. Not only did Tokio Hotel upend Coldplay, but they did it in grand, sweeping fashion. Radiohead fought off a feisty Spoon to get into the second round, but will they be able to rely on their status as indie legends to carry them past the German upstarts?