MotD Public Service Announcement
sorry, no guitars, but loads about using the tags here
As the readership has grown here at MotD—which Al Bellenchia and I are both grateful for—I’ve become increasingly concerned that readers will wonder if a certain song or artist has been featured in this space, but feel intimidated by the number of articles to sort through. Since I’ve documented that Substack’s search tool can be a doofus, I know better than to trust it. So I’ve been wondering about ways to help MotD readers find older pieces they might be interested in.
Turns out that my penchant for tagging articles was actually useful! Some of you may have noticed a couple of new items in the menu bar on the MotD home page, viz. “Playlists” and “Rush”. I created the links simply by inserting the appropriate tag into the homepage URL, e.g.: musicoftheday.substack.com/t/rush ; and musicoftheday.substack.com/t/playlists.1
I chose to link to those tags in the menu bar because I thought they’d be ones readers would be most interested in. Obviously it would be unwieldy to add a link for every tag there2, so instead I’ll describe my process for creating and using tags to aid in finding niche subgenres, and will link to a few major categories at the end.
Tagging is even more imprecise than trying to label a specific piece of music, as reasonable people will disagree, especially when subgenres enter the picture.3 So, with some exceptions, I try to keep higher-level categories separated. For example, there’s a “rock” tag and a separate “prog” tag. “Pop” and “rock” are separate tags with substantial overlap, since the concept categories also do.
However, “gothic rock” is its own tag: /t/gothic-rock.4 Whenever there are multiple words in a tag, in the URL the space is represented as a hyphen. That’s important to know for those wanting to explore MotD’s many tags. Nonexistent tags return a “page not found” error and the archive page.
Despite being both much too white and too nerdy to understand the distinctions between hip-hop and rap, each has its own tag5: /t/hip-hop and /t/rap. There’s overlap, but it probably isn’t accurate.
Currently, Rush is the only band with its own tag—and that isn’t because it’s my favorite band. I seem to have gotten a bit of a reputation here as a Rush superfan and as of this date, the band has appeared in 31 MotDs, so the special focus is warranted, particularly since a search on “rush” returns all instances of the word. (The next-closest musicians are tied at 15 each; they’re Queen and Yes.)
If this PSA is useful to you, it can be bookmarked. But—of course!—it has its own tags: /t/psa and /t/tags. And it’s in the nav menu too, under “PSAs.”
That’s more than enough yammering: anyone interested in exploring MotD via the tags should be pretty well set for the journey.6 If you’re having trouble finding something that you think should be a tag here, feel free to start a private chat with me to get assistance.
Higher-Level Tags
instrumental (irrespective of genre)
If you have questions, thoughts, and/or ideas you’d like to share, please do so! For example, Rush is currently the only musician with its own tag, as I had to manually add it to all extant MotDs because I stupidly didn’t think there’d be any value in those tags. Would it be useful to tag all MotDs with the musician/s?
I’ll consider each suggestion; but please keep in mind this is a passion, not a paying gig. MotD will never be monetized, so despite how much I love being here, it has to be balanced with my obligations and responsibilities.
Now back to our intermittently scheduled MotDs, always in progress. One might appear later today: Supertramp has been battling an entire subgenre for control of the radio station in my mind, and one may yet win.
And just in case anyone’s wondering: yes, of course the best rock public service announcement—with guitar!—has appeared here.
currently at 70, 72, 74, 76
and i’ve been a little sloppy with some; sorry, country fans
similarly with fuzz rock, which i expect to get more of a workout if my favorite local band keeps releasing new music
and likely misused; if you think so, send me a note via chat and i’ll look into it
i hope it’s a joyful one
this genre is currently a mess, since i’ve apparently tagged many a song with this label if there’s even a hint of twang. i’ll try to clean it up
I love the supreme organizational skills. You clearly have. Some people might use a different word to describe this quality. Another option you might want to try is creating a post that is essentially a bunch of hyperlinks to band names. Think of it like a table of contents. I’ve seen other writers do that and then pin that post to the top of their page. It’s probably more work than it’s worth, but I will admit that I’ve thought about doing something like that myself.
Thank you Jackie! I should have thought of something like this--I can't even find my own articles!