There seems to be different practice regarding song titles. You often (not always) find the UK capitalizing the first word in a title but nothing after that save proper nouns. In the US you’re more likely to see song titles treated like book titles, with all words capitalized.except for prepositions and articles. But I don’t know if there’s an official practice either way; let’s just say the Brits seem to be more influenced by the French, who don’t capitalize anything if they can avoid it, America does things more the German way, who sometimes seem to overdo it.
We are talking about sentences here. Alphabetization generally ignores articles at the start of a title, and if you find lists which clump all the “thes” together it was likely done by automation.
And it’s a good thing, too, as half the time I don’t know whether the article is part of the title or not. Happens with band names, too. It’s “The Smashing Pumpkins,” officially, but their name shows up as “Smashing Pumpkins” on the cover of the first two albums and Zeitgeist. Would be silly to have some albums under “T” and others under “S.”
Yes, sometimes for reason of graphic impact album designers will put the name without the article, this can lead to confusion to be sure but if the group is famous enough you probably already know what’s what. (Every record by the Ramones just has the word RAMONES on the jacket in big loud scary letters but come on! We all know it’s “the Ramones”, except for a few diehard contrarians who spend way too much energy trying to tease out meaning where there is none.)
If all “The” bands were stored under ‘T’, that would be idiotic because half of all bands would be under that letter, virtually unsortable and unsearchable.
But I guess that’s the point you wanted to make.
Any thoughts on how sentences about Wham! should be punctuated? Or ? and the Mysterians? Where do they get alphabetized?
“0-9” is where I’d look, where I assume I’d find it next to 10,000 Maniacs, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, and !!!.
This reminds me of when I worked at Jack in the Box and we had a digital sound system that played music in the lobby. The player was in the office and would show the song title and artist on a little LCD screen. Whoever coded the software for this particular player was savvy enough that, in the event that the artist’s named was listed in lastname-comma-firstname format (E.g. Lennon, John) it would remove the comma and put the first word at the end to turn it into “John Lennon”. However, it couldn’t handle band names that included a comma, and so on one occasion I noticed that it was playing a song by “Stills, Nash, and Young Crosby”.
Wonder what it would have done with Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds? You might recall that they did “Don’t Pull Your Love,” in 1971.
It sounds like a quartet, but it was really three guys:
– [Dan] Hamilton
– Joe Frank [Carollo]
– [Tommy] Reynolds
Would have sent your sound system into a tizzy, no doubt!
“Joe Frank and Reynolds Hamilton”, I assume.
LOL! Yes, most likely.
Was David Crosby ever young?
So much so that he once almost cut his hair.
When he started out with the Byrds in 1964 and still hadn’t grown his famous moustache, he looked like a schoolboy.
Under Q, for Question Mark. That was his showbiz name.