Happy Thanksgiving from the Radiohead Tourment

Happy Thanksgiving from the Radiohead tournament.

We are in no ways drunk.

-- Brad and Bryan

It's up

Thanks for waiting.

There were some bumps along the way, but the bracket is finally up.

The good news is that for that wait, the bracket is completely awesome. It's time to start voting. Voting in the first round will run through December 15th. There are 32 matchups to choose from.

We'll update this blog as we flesh out the schedule from here on out, but for now, enjoy voting.

Thanks again,

Brad and Bryan

Click here to vote

We shall return

... tomorrow, with more Radiohead goodness, and begin anew our march to the tournament. If you've submitted a ballot to us over email, get ready to see it here.

We would apologize for our deliquency but we were at the beach and, as such, do not apologize.

All Points West, Tweeter Center and the actual tournament

So you may have noticed that there haven't been many posts here lately. We've been crossing the American northeast and midwest, and tomorrow we'll head off again, this time eastward to Wednesday night's show at the Tweeter Center in Massachusetts. This is actually where we saw our first-ever concert, but we're not going to say who it was. Ever.

When we get back, we'll start moving toward the actual tournament with some e-mail blasts, some reader-generated lists and whatever else. We actually missed last weekend's All Points West shows in New Jersey because we were in Chicago, but there's Thom, right there in the upper-right hand corner.

Akron, OH... Radiohead country?

We're not from Akron, Ohio — our city has far more Empire State Buildings in it — but we were there this weekend for a Greek lamb roast. It was delicious, and the best part was seeing our Greek friend who's all about the mysticism of life. Put it bluntly, he loves coincidences. He turned a chance meeting with a guy from Michigan at an airport bar into a $2,000 profit. How? He bet on the Detroit Pistons because of the meeting, and they won the NBA Championship. Put simply, he has a lust for life.

So we were catching up this weekend, and we told him about our site, and how we're up to more than 2,500 votes, and he loved it; fine and dandy. But where were our coincidences? We were outside a restaurant at the time, and the five of us went into eat and were shown to an outdoor table. Akron has these nice things we don't have here — let's call'em "stars" — and we sat under them to order on a pitch-perfect night when I noticed that a live version of Fake Plastic Trees was playing. Spooky? Sure. But here were the next 19 songs to come on:

High and Dry
Just
My Iron Lung
Black Star
Street Spirit (skipped through)
Idioteque
Airbag
Subterranean Homesick Alien (skipped through)
Exit Music (skipped through)
Let Down
Karma Police
No Surprises (skipped through)
Lucky
The Tourist
Everything in its Right Place (skipped through)
Kid A
The National Anthem (skipped through)
How to Disappear Completely (skipped through)
Optimistic

We left before they could get to Amnesiac.

So yeah... Akron, Ohio.

Your votes vs. our album poll, by the numbers

As you may have noticed, we have a new poll on the site — What's your favorite song on the Bends? Now's a good time to look back at our last poll. We asked you for your favorite album, and you responded:

1% Pablo Honey
7% The Bends
34% OK Computer
31% Kid A
8% Amnesiac
7% Hail to the Thief
13% In Rainbows

These results aren't that surprising. It's a testament to the absurdity of Radiohead that the Bends checks in at 7 percent, but other that that, this looks about right. If we had ended the poll a week ago, Kid A would have been number one, but OKC made a comeback, as number one albums of decades are wont to do.

One thing I was interested in, though, was how the album poll results squared with your Top 10 votes. I took the average number of votes for each album's songs and caculated each one as a percentage of the total album vote (In Rainbows Bonus Disc and B-Sides not included). Here were the results:

2% Pablo Honey
12% The Bends
25% OK Computer
22% Kid A
12% Amnesiac
10% Hail to the Thief
17% In Rainbows

These numbers are closer together, which is not surprising either. One thing Radiohead has done is create a music catalog where there are few, if any, throwaway songs; these albums register closer in quality when you consider them song-by-song than as a whole. One-third of our readers prefer OKC to the rest of the bunch, but it has received only 25 percent of the vote. That's not a mark against our ranking system: it's shows that no matter how great the songs are on an album, there's a separate quality that makes a great album great that OK Computer and Kid A have in abundance, and that the others don't. They still have some of the greatest rock songs ever recorded and 35% of our album poll votes; nice work if you can get it.

What's your No. 1?

So we've done a lot of ranking over here at the Radiohead Tournament. Here's the most important question: What's your No. 1 song? What song do you love above all others? And why?

Send along your answers/essays/treatises to radioheadtournament [at] gmail.com. We're looking forward to'em.

It's all been done before

We realize that we're not the first people to rank Radiohead songs, nor will we be the last. Here are the results of the others that have dared to attempt this endeavour, which got us an "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! How am I supposed to rank only 10 songs?" email today. We love it because we don't know the answer.

Mortigi Tempo, the message board at green plastic radiohead, ranked the top 100 Radiohead songs (for the third time!) late last year. Their 84 ballots yielded the following top 10:

1 There There
2 How to Disappear Completely
3 Pyramid Song
4 Idioteque
5 Paranoid Android
6 Everything in its Right Place
7 Nude
8 Street Spirit
9 Airbag
10 Exit Music (For a Film)

Spoiler alert: three songs on this list are in the exact same position on ours. You can see the rest of their list here. The most interesting thing? Three of their "bottom" four songs — i.e., for our purposes, 61-64 — are also the same on our list. For now at least. And on a personal note, the editorial we — that is to say, me — is VERY pleased at the love for There There.

Over at Merry Swankster, they've actually run a 65-song Radiohead Tournament before: the final four matchups were Karma Police vs. Idioteque and Paranoid Android vs. Fake Plastic Trees; P.A. defeated Idioteque, 66-64, to win the tournament.

Our results are a cross between the two tournaments, in both style and substance. Fake Plastic Trees is polling pretty well in our survey; it comes in at number 23 on Mortigi Tempo's list. The fact that FTP is polling well among a larger group of people shouldn't, frankly, surprise anyone. But How to Disappear Completely, a juggernaut in our survey, was a paltry 14 seed in the Merry Swankster tournament, and has been tracking much closer to its Mortigi Tempo numbers for us. And by much closer we mean identically. The nice thing about this is we're obviously getting a lot of Radiohead demographics — should such a thing exist — and, hopefully, a lot more participants. Keep'em coming.

One final tournament to tell you about: We Listen For You ran a March Music Madness poll earlier this year to determine the world's number one indie band... guess who won?

2,000 votes in, risers and fallers, and more

We passed the 2,000 vote mark this weekend, so thanks to everyone who has voted for making this, in our first two weeks, far better than we expected. We're up to 2,185 at last count. I mean, almost 2,200 votes in two weeks? Yeesh.

You should see some brand-new features on the main site today: a Tell a Friend link at the top of the page, and links to Digg, Facebook and our RSS feed. If you haven't Digg-ed us yet, be sure to click at the bottom to help us spread the word about the tournament.

Which brings us to the tournament. Here are the biggest movers and shakers since last Monday:

Biggest Rise: Like Spinning Plates (29), rising six spots
Biggest Drop: Go to Sleep (55), dropping five spots
Smallest Margin: One vote separates Just (1423 votes) from Videotape (1422), and Black Star (660) from Fog (659)
Number one alert: The No. 1 overall seed has a 1,300 vote lead over its closest competitor.
First round 8/9 matchups: If the tournament started tomorrow, the following matchups among the closest-ranked teams would be:

Creep vs. Videotape
Where I End and You Begin vs. Motion Picture Sountrack
Kid A vs. Just
Like Spinning Plates vs. Knives Out

Of these, I think Creep vs. Videotape is by far the most interesting. You'd get their most nakedly commercial song of all time versus, arguably, the exact opposite — the last song off their free album. Creep will almost certainly have a voting bump in the elimination rounds among casual fans, but we'll see if it will be enough.

E-mail us your lists!

After you submit your list on the main page, feel free to email us your choices at radioheadtournament [at] gmail.com, with general comments or individual comments about each song. Don't worry about entering comments twice; if you send'em in the email, we'll keep them around to use come tournament time, just as if you had submitted them on the main page. If we like your list, we'll publish it here along with you have to say. Cheers!

Vs. The "Best of Radiohead"

Reader Jeppe emailed us with a great question — how would our results stack up against the recently-released "Best of Radiohead" album?

Taking a look at the track list for CD1 of "Best of Radiohead," there's a decent amount of overlap. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the four lowest-ranking songs on our survey to appear on the disc are commercially-well-known hits from The Bends and Pablo Honey. Other than that, it matches pretty well, though our second-ranked song — and it's second by a mile in either direction — has completely disappeared from that disc, as have two of our other top 10 songs. They're all on the Bonus Disc, though, and if the average non-Radiohead fan bought the 2-disc set and plopped down £.01 for In Rainbows, our survey feels they'd be pretty caught up on what they've been missing — for whatever reason — so far.

That said, here are our survey's top 10-ranked songs that appear on neither "Best of Radiohead" CD1 or 2 nor on In Rainbows, with their current rank:

1. Climbing Up The Walls (19)
2. A Wolf at the Door (22)
3. Life in a Glass House (29)
4. You and Whose Army? (30)
5. Kid A (31)
6. Where I End and You Begin (32)
7. Motion Picture Soundtrack (34)
8. Like Spinning Plates (35)
9. Subterranean Homesick Alien (41)
10. Morning Bell (43)

For the record, if In Rainbows was included, it would have six of the spots on this list.

Fear not, Pablo Honey fans

... all five of you.

We've got the "favorite album" poll results up there now, and Pablo Honey clocks in with an underwhelming 0 percent of the vote, just undercutting OK Computer's dominant 35 percent (Kid A is second with 26 percent, while In Rainbows notches 15). Despite that, it IS on the board with five total votes. If you're one of those five people, crack a cold one, because we're thinking about you today.

1,000 strong for Radiohead

In the words of Ron Burgundy, "Well, that escalated quickly."

We launched the site on July 14th and sent out some emails to a few of our friends; a few days later, we emailed a bunch of music blogs, hoping to add to our count of 40 or so ballots.

After we were written up at green plastic, URB, largehearted boy and a cold sweat, among others, that number has jumped to more than 1,000 after only one week.

Keep'em coming, and tell your friends.

This will be the official news blog for the Radiohead Tournament; we'll mix in tournament updates along with general Radiohead news. We're not ready quite yet to release partial voting totals, but the results are very cool. We just want the submissions to be made with as little outside interference as possible.

We're going to add a refer-a-friend module to the homepage and start post our poll results, and we'll follow that up with a new poll every week or two. This blog will be updated more or less daily as long as there's news (and it looks like there will be), so check back for updates regularly.

Most of all, thanks for voting. This is getting fun.