Recent Relevance of Retired (or semi-) Wrock

On Facebook, Russ of Creevey Crisis and Starfish and Stick, posted a note regarding Wizard Rock. Its main theme was to get opinion on how bands could stay in the consciousness of fans and how they could create new fans even if they were no longer together, or on hiatus. He was thinking in particular of those bands that led the way in the genre and yet were no longer known by a large part of the wrock community, i.e. Hollow Godric and Ginny and the Heartbreakers. I read Russ’ note with interest and thought I’d give my opinion as a more recent recruit to the world of Wizard Rock. Of course this is just my personal opinion so feel free to agree or disagree with what I’ve said, although I’m not up for an argument, just stating my feelings on the subject.

First I guess I should give a bit of background about me as this is what shapes my thoughts and ideas, likes and dislikes. Obviously I’m older (by some considerable way) than most wrock fans (and bands), but I am a music fan and have been since I was a toddler and good music, regardless of genre has always appealed to me. My extensive record/CD/MP3 collection encompasses many types of music, although I have to admit that in the Muggle world Rap doesn’t really float my boat, R&B (as it is defined these days) leaves me a little cold and Country & Western generally makes me run screaming for the hills.

I was a latecomer to just about everything Harry Potter-related – the fandom, fan fiction, podcasts, you name it...they all passed me by for a long time until the last book was over and done and everyone I knew who had an interest in Harry Potter had gone back to living normal useful and productive lives and no longer wanted to discuss plot points from the series or help me through my grieving for Severus Snape. Soon, I realised that this magical world which had so taken over my life for ten years, and was continuing to do so, was to my friends, nothing more than a series of interesting, if somewhat annoying books.

There were two things that marked a turning point for me – a particularly traumatic conversation, during which someone told me to stop daydreaming about children’s books and get on with life, because I was turning into a freak, made me decide to look on the internet to see if there was anyone else like me out there, which of course resulted in me finding the Harry Potter fandom in all its glory; and buying an I-Pod which meant I-Tunes and finding the hundreds of Potter-related podcasts.

Amazed, and somewhat relieved to find that I wasn’t alone in my obsession with Harry Potter – although possibly a bit older than others, I happily began downloading and listening to podcasts, mostly wishing that I’d known about them at the time they’d come out. How much more would I have enjoyed the books, had I have had Pottercast there with me? And I know for certain that I’d have felt less as if there was something wrong with me for queuing up with all those kids at midnight for a book and refusing to do anything until I’d finished reading it the following day, if I’d known that there were so many other people as involved in the whole thing as me. As a huge Snape fan I of course gravitated towards Snapecast and it was there that I first encountered Wizard Rock. The track was Snape vs. Snape by Ministry of Magic and I heard it whilst at the hairdressers. By the time I’d emerged with my new hairstyle I knew there was a whole new world of music out there that I just had to check out. Now I will admit that I had vaguely heard that a band called Harry and the Potters existed but I had never bothered to check them out and had forgotten about them until Ministry of Magic came along to shake up my world.

And so I studied the internet and found that MySpace was the place to find Wizard Rock. I signed up and starting with Ministry of Magic and Harry and the Potters, I soon found myself delving deeper and deeper into the wrock world via the friend links. At the same time I had discovered the list of bands on Wizrocklopedia and in the days when the Wrock Wiki was still around would spend my lunch hour checking out info on the bands on there as I had no access to MySpace. And then there was Atriumcast, which also introduced me to a number of new bands (I had not, at that stage, discovered WZRD). Evenings were spent downloading and listening to tracks by the bands I’d found, but there were so many bands out there, that I didn’t have time to delve too deeply into their backgrounds and if I’m honest, bands that allowed you to download their music for free (and not all of them did by any means) were more likely to be of interest to me than ones who didn’t. Over the last eighteen months or so I have amassed a huge amount of Wizard Rock (both free and paid for), and most of my time is still spent listening to it. However, as time has gone on, I no longer spend so much time looking out for new bands, although if, like the Deathsticks or Quickspell, one happens to come my way I’ll happily give them a listen.

As far as the bands I have already got music by goes (and I think at the last count that was something like 350) I have been working my way steadily through it and very unscientifically rating each band’s folder depending on how much I like 1) their style of music, 2) their singing (the great thing about wrock is that anyone can have a go and be accepted, the downside of this is that there is some quite appalling stuff out there) and 3) the lyrics of the songs.

Now I am a great fan of the comedy songs, so I love bands like Peeved, The Blibbering Humdingers and The Moaning Myrtles, I’m also a huge fan of decent female singers which is why I love Split Seven Ways and her offshoots, The Butterbeer Experience and Romilda Vane and the Chocolate Cauldrons so much. Oliver Boyd and the Remembralls, The Remus Lupins and Marked As His Equal are just awesome. Bands like Ministry of Magic and the completely wonderful (and yes I am a major fan girl of theirs) The Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office make music that makes me happy and want to dance and Draco and the Malfoys just make me laugh with pleasure.

It is obviously these types of bands who I have concentrated on buying music by along with the many charity compilations that are always being released (after all I have a limited amount of money available for music each month and I don’t just listen exclusively to wrock) and of course I tend to listen to these bands more than the others. I do still find new stuff – hearing The Common Welsh Green on Accio Potter Wizard Radio a few weeks ago made me check out The Quaffle Kids and I am now the proud owner of their excellent album Bludgers and Broomsticks, but to be honest, when I find a band, I don’t know whether they have been around forever or have only started a few weeks before. I, for instance, knew of Hollow Godric because I have a couple of their tracks, downloaded from MySpace back in that first frenzy, but I had no idea that they were one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the genre. To me they were just another wrock band.

Also for me, these days I tend to prefer to download the albums where I can, both because of ease of doing so, plus the bonus of saving space in my already overcrowded flat. Shipping from the US can also come at quite a cost and I have had to wait anything up to two months for a CD to arrive, both of which are annoying when you really want to hear the album. Therefore I am more likely to buy albums by bands who have released their work on I-Tunes/Amazon, than those who are selling hard copies from a link on their MySpace page.

I think for a band to stay popular there needs to be a healthy balance between self-promotion and fan exposure. Band promotion would come from touring and regular blogging or perhaps with newsletters (as Draco and the Malfoys and The Whomping Willows have just started) even if just to remind people that they are still there. Now obviously this isn’t going to happen if the band is no longer active, for whatever reason, so perhaps, as is the case with the millions of defunct Muggle bands around the world, their fans should make the effort to spread the word in their place. Touring is not the be all and end all of becoming and remaining famous. After all most, if not all, of the current major US wrock bands have never played (and, sadly, probably will never play) in the UK and yet they’re as well known to the (admittedly smaller) wrock community as they are in the US.

Unfortunately, conversely the same isn’t necessarily true of UK bands like The Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office, Peeved, Siriusly Hazza P, Shrieking Shack Disco Gang etc. although RiddleTM are obviously doing something right in that department – they’re definitely well-known to the US community. And then there’s the rest of the world. So many places producing Wizard Rock and yet so much of it going unnoticed amongst the wider mass of wrockers, even in these days of YouTube and streaming TV.

Why is this? Well because bands like Harry and the Potters, The Remus Lupins and The Whomping Willows get out there and tour regularly, and when you discuss with other wrock fans about albums that are worth purchasing, you are more likely to get a recommendation for their latest album than for an album by a band that haven’t released, or even played anything for years. This is the nature of music and will always be. However, with the change to MySpace, the chances for finding the older bands is receding - or at least the chance to download and hear properly their songs. Since the initial major change which stopped downloads (this happened about a month after I discovered Wizard Rock) I spend most of my time on the site catching up with blog updates from the bands I’m interested in rather than trying to find ones that I know nothing about. To be honest if I hadn’t already come across Hollow Godric I think it unlikely that I’d know anything about them, or would even know that they were there to search for. And even when you do manage to find the pages of these bands, many of the links no longer work, so unless they’ve stored a huge amount of songs on their player (and I seem to remember that a lot of bands lost the songs stored on the old players), you’ll never get to hear them.

Of course some bands seem to be able to reach iconic status regardless. I know Russ mentioned The Weasel King – who I would agree is totally awesome. I too have no idea why he’s so popular – I just know that his music appeals to me. Generally though, I assume these bands reach this status because of some quirk. For instance, whilst there are several excellent wrock bands that feature members who are under the age of sixteen (and yes I’m thinking of The Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office again amongst others), The Hungarian Horntails once again won the WRPCA despite, as far as I’m aware, not releasing a single thing in 2008. As someone who missed them when they came out, I can’t see why they’re still so popular, except that they feature very young children and this I assume gives them the ‘aah’ factor. Maybe if fans could find a way to give their own favourite band that little quirk these ‘older’ bands wouldn’t disappear from the consciousness of the masses.

Unfortunately, I found out about wrock too late to join the Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club for 2007 (if anyone has a spare set they’d like to sell me I’d be eternally grateful as there’s several of the EPs that I would LOVE to own – Ginny and the Heartbreakers Love Storm amongst them), but I did sign up for both last year and this year’s selections. I think they are excellent value for money and quality and are a good way to find out about bands you either might never have heard of, or would never previously consider listening to and I’m pleased to see that some of the less major bands are having a chance to record for them, thus hopefully ensuring greater exposure. Whilst I expect this will have no effect on future award ceremonies, nor will it do anything to make bands like Hollow Godric more popular it does at least give a reasonably priced way to amass a collection of the very different types of music within the Wizard Rock genre. Perhaps the way forward would be for someone to produce a collection of the unknown ‘greats’ of the wrock world...although who would choose what should be on that is another question all of its own.

So I went and listened to Hollow Godric again to see why I don’t have them on my wrock favourites playlist (that currently stands at about 250 tracks) and I found out that it’s because whilst they are obviously a good band, the tracks I have by them are pretty boring. Lovely sounding and well crafted to be sure, but I have plenty of music that’s like that. Unfortunately, there’s nothing about them in what I’ve heard that stands out to me as being better than the rest. When I’m spending my hard-earned money on music I’ll be buying something that I adore, like The Butterbeer Experience, Split Seven Ways or RiddleTM rather than Hollow Godric I’m afraid.

Live Wizard Rock (via UStream anyway)

The last few weeks have been interesting ones for me on the Wrock front. With tours starting by several of the US bands and the advent of streaming TV on my new fabby computer, I have, for the first time been able to watch these bands performing live.

The day before Leaky Con started I was lucky enough to see Witherwings, Snidget, The Butterbeer Experience, Swish and Flick and The House of Black in NYC. This was then followed last weekend with a concert by Justin Finch Fletchley, The Moaning Myrtles and The Whomping Willows, and last night with the concert by Gred and Forge, Tonks and the Aurors and The Remus Lupins who are playing in St Louis. Each of the shows has been excellent and I’ve enjoyed them very much. However, the buzz of being at the concert just isn’t there when I watch it from the lounge and I now very much want to see these and other bands live.

Sadly, it is unlikely that any of these bands will ever make it over the pond to the UK (although I did suggest it to Stacey of Swish and Flick earlier) so the earliest I am likely to see them performing will be at Leaky Con 2011 (I’d love to go to Wrockstock in November this year, but I’ve got absolutely no idea how I’d get there as it’s in the middle of nowhere and Infinitus in July 2010, although tempting, even if only for Lena’s wrock opera ‘Blood and Beauty’, is out of my price league when I’m so determined to be at Leaky Con the year after). I just hope all these excellent bands are still around. After all The Mudbloods have said their final live concert will be at Wrockstock.

Fortunately, the news isn’t all bad. The UK has produced some of the best Wrock bands around and they do hold regular concerts. I just need to be able to get to one. As luck would have it this month sees Hogwarts Jamboree which is being held in London on Sunday 28th June and features the bands Bella and the Deatheaters, Siriusly Hazza P, Shrieking Shack Disco Gang and RiddleTM. They will also be showing the Wizard Rock documentary film ‘We Are Wizards’ which I believe is the first and probably only time that it’ll be shown in the UK. In addition there will be plenty of other HP-related fun and frolics. Tickets are still available, at the link above, so if you’re free on that day get on down to the Loom Bar in London and join us for a quality UK HP Day.

Wizard Rock and the Hurtful Podcasts

I have just listened to a Podcast called Stereo Radiation which was pointed out to me by Alex Heule from Accio-Potter. He was upset that they had broadcast an episode criticising his Accio-Potter Wrock podcast purely because it had knocked them out of the Top Ten on Podcast Alley. So I listened to this jealous and quite frankly vicious rant to see what the fuss was about and now I’m really upset about it too.

I understand that not everyone ‘gets’ the Harry Potter books and the fandom that has grown up around it and that Wizard Rock is seen as a joke to those who haven’t bothered to actually explore the genre and although I personally feel that these people are missing out on something wonderful, they are fully entitled to their opinion. However, that said, to criticise so roundly the APW podcast and Wizard Rock in general, without any real knowledge of the subject, purely because you’re jealous that they are getting more votes on a Podcast voting site is pathetic in the extreme.

The SR podcast is nothing but a badly-informed, petty and spiteful dig at the Accio-Potter podcasters and Wizard Rockers alike and their ignorance is actually almost as annoying as their criticisms. Several times before getting to the segment about APW, they mentioned that this HP podcast had knocked them from the Top Ten - obviously this is the only motivation for their spite.

Funnily enough SR themselves aren’t too keen on criticism. At one point they said they were happy to receive comments about the show and that they’d make fun of how silly people are. They also said they were pretty charitable, unless you leave a nasty comment in which case you’ll get ignored. Oh, and if you want to leave a comment on their site, you have to register with them first and all comments are moderated – and guess what - no criticisms get through. I guess that you’d have to take this course when your podcast consists not, as they like to think, of witty banter, but a spewing of bile and jealousy.

First they began with a character assassination of the APW podcasters whilst playing snippets of the show, making puerile assumptions about them. I can only imagine that these assumptions are based on their own experience – certainly the way they described the podcasters made me imagine that they were actually talking about themselves. Not quite the gentle teasing that they mentioned earlier.

More rudeness against the APW crew ensues when the SR presenters point out what they consider to be the mispronunciation of the word ‘Accio.’ Luckily for us the presenters of this HP-hating podcast have the definitive answer. This is followed by a rant that HP podcasts get into the Top Ten because they merely mention HP and that they should produce one of their own – more proof, if it were needed, that jealousy is fueling this entire edition. And then they move onto criticising the Wrock itself.

Playing ‘Ice Cream Man’ by Harry and the Potters, they first of all picked up on the band name with the inference that it was lame. Then, completely showing their ignorance of the HP books they asked why they were singing about an ice cream man – hinting that it had nothing to do with wizards apart from the band name and the words Diagon Alley in the song. Further criticism was soon poured upon HatP, with speculation that they were actually a middle-aged rock band purely doing this to cash in and rip off the gullible HP fans.

In fact it was this criticism, which appeared several times throughout the podcast, which really infuriated me the most. As anyone, who has ever vaguely had anything to do with Wizard Rock knows, the whole thing is based on friendship and community and family and love. How many of the bands have given away their music rather than sold it? And how many of the bands give at least some the money they do make to charity and good causes? Has a genre ever produced so many charity albums? And to suggest that Wizard Rock bands are doing it only to cash in is to completely denigrate an entertaining and creative genre of music.

Finally, and the thing that really made my blood boil, was the comment that wizard rockers fall into either one of two camps – those that are cashing in and those that are, in the terms of the SR presenters ‘freaks.’ A huge criticism followed about people wasting time on writing songs about HP, along with surprise that anyone would be interested in hearing or buying the music. Interestingly, they also made it sound as if it was just a few bands, producing sub quality music – rather than the thousands of bands, in the main producing very good quality songs.

Of course the presenters admitted to knowing nothing about Wizard Rock and the blurb for this particular podcast describes the Wizard Rock genre as having a narrow focus and being bizarre. However, to use that as an excuse to denigrate people is not just lame, it’s downright nasty. One of the presenters said that he wouldn’t even know where to find ten wizard rock songs, let alone eighty four minutes worth (the running time of the episode of APW that they were discussing) – perhaps he should try checking out Google. A search for ‘Wizard Rock’ brings up almost 1.5 million results – so not that hard to find.

The main reason I’m so annoyed about this podcast is that these two presenters have been so incredibly mean to a bunch of people, that although I’ve never met in real life, I am proud to call friends and they have so rudely criticised the entire genre, without even bothering to investigate whether the music is any good. To call people who have the talent to write entertaining songs freaks is probably about as low as you can go in my opinion. I guess their bile must stem from the fact that they aren’t talented enough to write anything worth listening to and they are unable to keep their jealousy from spewing out.

For them, this jealousy has obviously turned into a vendetta as their new episode also contains a rant about Accio-Potter and Wizard Rock with yet more slandering of the AP podcaster. I know these stupid little podcasts think themselves subversive and entertaining, but really they are nothing more than spiteful. Perhaps they should consider about how pathetic they sound, before they start spouting off about other people’s podcasts.