The End Of Everything-Is-A-Bracket Season Is Finally, Mercifully Here
By Boobie
The nets have been cut, the Luther Vandross song has been played, and the moment we’ve all been waiting for with baited breath since the beginning of March is finally here: everything is not a bracket anymore.
Content needs to be created, arguments need to be had, and time needs to be wasted, I get it. But if I see a bracket at any time before Selection Sunday 2019 I’m going to set whatever electronic device or piece of paper it’s presented to me on aflame. I should have know this would become A Thing because the trend started the absolute worst way it could have: with the Kanye West song bracket.
By no means is this a shot at Kanye West. I think that he’s great, I think he’s the best. The problem is the online discourse regarding Kanye West. He’s such a divisive figure — purposefully so — that any argument about his albums or his songs tends to turn people using other people’s choices for favorite and least favorite works to paint a caricature of whomever they’re arguing with while presenting the best and most nuanced one of themselves possible. That’s true of any online argument, of course, but Kanye seems be the perfect microcosm of that fact, so the fact that the first bracket to really pop was related to him was both predictable and foreboding.
Here’s one thing that makes the bracket element so much worse, than the “rank the albums” or, for other bodies of work, “top 5/10” or “best/worst” discussions that are common throughout the year: brackets, by nature, present a version of what is usually a subjective specificity to begin with that is then upended by objectivity. Brackets have seeding, and often, brackets are exclusive, so not only are people digging into their positions on what is good and bad with exaggerated passion in opposition to others making their own picks, they’re digging in against the structure they’re using as well. People are filling out and debating their Kanye bracket while complaining that the bracket itself is invalid because “Gone” somehow isn’t included, or their Disney movie bracket while saying that Toy Story 2 faces off against Toy Story too early for the end results to be reflective of the actual quality of the films. Even more objective measures of seeding, like Rembert Browne;s use of social media followers to render seeding in his Who Won The Yeat bracket (which is one of the only good brackets) don’t do much better in this regard.
Another thing that makes a bracket-style discussion worse than a normal one is the fact that it just. Goes. On. For. Ever. On Twitter, you can generally bail on any disagreement or debate at any time you want, provided you feel comfortable letting the idiot (everyone is an idiot unless they agree with you) have the last word. With a bracket, though, you get into a little bit of a groove. You pick a couple upsets, but they’re not really upsets, are they, because you’re right. But THEN, you have to keep arguing the merits of your selections over and over and over again, against other options with increasingly strong cases and passionate defenders, until it’s not fun anymore, it’s work. Pop culture brackets are debate club, except without the benefit of helping the nerds who have wanted to be lawyers since they were 10 years old get into law school.
The worst thing about brackets, though, is that they’re useless. In the same way that a GPA takes more specific information (like a grade average in a class), makes it less precise (now a 99 and a 93 are the same thing, or a 0 and a 59), then combines it and spits out a number that sums a person up in the eyes of those looking at it, a bracket takes its flawed starting point, then inputs the data of however many (usually uninformed) people care to vote, weighted oftentimes by biased signal-boosting, and eventually spit out a winner. I’m as guilty of this as anyone; I haven’t seen enough Disney movies enough times or thought critically enough about them to make most real choices on which is the best, and that’s true for basically all topics. But it also means that the winner of a bracket doesn’t actually signify anything, doesn’t tell us anything meaningful about the bracket’s topic. I mean, even the best Disney bracket I saw had the Incredibles in the Final Four, and that’s wrong to the degree that it makes you question whether democracy is actually a good idea.
That’s fine, I guess. They’re pointless fun, I get it. But not everything has to be a god damn bracket. There’s no reason that after a normal day I should close my eyes at night and have the shape of a bracket burned into my eyeballs like the ESPN Bottom Line at the bottom of a bar’s TV. I get it, you want to do brackets during March Madness because it’s topical. But please. They don’t do anything. Stop doing them until next year, and even then, please be more discerning about which ones you let suck you in, otherwise you’ll end up filling out my Bracket Bracket and arguing about which bracket is the best bracket with an egg avi with 8 followers. I can’t stand the sight of them. I promise, we can talk about why you think Late Registration is better than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy without some asshole who thinks Yeezus sucks making the whole internet share their stupid opinions about it first.
