Unraveling Obsession: Inside the Haunting World of The March Xness Anthology
Out of solidarity with the more confessionary aspects of March Xness, I will admit my prejudice in favor of the March Badness essays. This subcollection was my favorite for several reasons, all of them shamelessly subjective. For starters, I found the March Badness essays to be as infectious as COVID, as funny as an orangutan with hiccups, and as addictive as popping bubble wrap.
On a deeper dive into my druthers, I found that reexamining my relationship with shitty songs from the 70s and 80s was effortless, almost reflexive and instinctual, like blinking at sudden loud noises or checking the coin returns of vending machines. My March Badness partisanship did not demand that I blowtorch my past to lay bare the smoldering incongruities of my psyche — a meditative self-immolation, if you will, required by and celebrated in the other themed tournaments I was drawn to like Goth and Grunge. Rather, with March Badness, I only had to remember . . . and then sit back and read with jaw dropped in awe of the dazzling, multilayered analyses that combined personal animus, cultural anthropology, and music history to decode the worst songs of all time:
