There will be times when an undeserving song slips by into the next round while a great one goes down in defeat in a separate match-up.  That’s simply the way elimination tournaments work.  Clearly Ain’t Too Proud To Beg deserved a Round of 256 appearance more than No Cars Go.  But in the end, the tournament champion will have won 9 (or 10) times, and all the losers will have lost.

As you’ve probably noticed, I strive to put together match-ups within genres.  The reasons for this are two-fold.  First, there is a goal, at least until the Round of 256, to have a diversity of genres represented.   Match-ups will be decoupled from genres starting in that round.  Guillermo’s bracketology is based solely on scoring averages in the Round of 512.  The second purpose of genre based match-ups are that this group of voters simply prefer some genres to others, such that a punk song would never have a good shot against a Motown song.

With that out of the way, let’s look at what happened on Day 41.

I Heard It Through the Grapevine (Marvin Gaye) def. Ain’t Too Proud To Beg (Temptations), 121.5-117 .  Even though Marvin posted one of the highest averages of the tournament, I don’t see this song going all the way.  Maybe Round of 32?

Mr. Jones (Counting Crows) def. California Dreamin’ (Mamas and the Papas), 111-102.5 .  Mr. Jones has its detractors, but it has a shot at getting through the Round of 256.

No Cars Go (Arcade Fire) def. Modern Leper (Frightened Rabbit), 85-82.5 .

Thriller (Michael Jackson) def. I Think We’re Alone (Tiffany), 118-70  .

A Day in the Life (Beatles) def. Ohio (CSNY)  119-106 .   A Day in the Life is not messing around, picking up 10s from three different voters.  That’s pretty rare.