Introduction to Summer Psychosis: A bracket to determine our greatest artist of all time

Hello readers,

Hope everyone had a great Memorial Day! This is John speaking. As the member of this blog who posts the least, I would like to make up for it by introducing a summer-long feature called Summer Psychosis.

In short, Summer Psychosis is a gigantic, NCAA-style bracket used to determine the greatest artist of all time. The bracket is actually more than twice the size of a normal March Madness bracket, with 150 artists included, then whittled down to 128 through a preliminary round. Perhaps it would be better to show you a schedule... 

May 29th: Introduction to Summer Psychosis

Week of June 4th: Preliminary round voting (22 matchups)

Week of June 11th: 1st round voting, part 1 (16 matchups)

Week of June 18th: 1st round voting, part 2 (16 matchups)

Week of June 25th: 1st round voting, part 3 (16 matchups)

Week of July 2nd: 1st round voting, part 4 (16 matchups)

Week of July 9th: 2nd round voting, part 1 (16 matchups)

Week of July 16th: 2nd round voting, part 2 (16 matchups)

Week of July 23rd: 3rd round voting (16 matchups)

Week of July 30th: Sweet 16 voting (8 matchups)

Week of August 6th: Elite 8 voting (4 matchups)

Week of August 13th: Final Four voting (2 matchups)

Week of August 20th: Championship voting (1 matchup)

August 24th: Champion crowned!

The 150 artists that are included in Summer Psychosis were taken from the fantastic site Acclaimedmusic.net, which compiles countless critics lists of the greatest albums and songs, runs them through an algorithm and ranks the 3000 most recommended songs and albums of all time. As if this site wasn't great already, it also ranks the top 1000 most recommended artists based on their album and song placements. The top 150 artists from this list were used as the blueprint for the bracket and ranked accordingly. Since you're obviously wondering who's in this bracket, here's the link: Summer Psychosis. Note: the 'artist or artist' seeds signify a preliminary round matchup, which will be first on the docket because it decides most of the three lowest seeds.

A preview of a certain week's matchups will be posted on Mondays, starting one week from today. Eric, Elliott, Mark, Steve and I will each vote on who they think should move on. The artist in any given matchup who gets the majority of five votes will advance to the next round. The results for each round will then be posted that Friday. As far as voting criteria is concerned, it's simple yet complicated. Which artist do you think is greater? There are many reasons that each artist in this bracket is great, otherwise they would not be here. However, it's all up to the (informed) opinions of five bloggers...so you'll probably will think that we got it horribly wrong at some point. But that's all part of the fun, of course! If you would like to vote for who you think should advance or even predict who will win, you can use the prediction feature in the bracket itself (just click on the link).

Anyway, we here at Frogs on a Log are excited for Summer Psychosis and can't wait for it to begin! There's nothing more we want from summer than historically great music and gut-wrenching decisions (although the beach is nice too). So, if we all start to go crazy in the next few months, at least you know that it won't be because of the heat.