Thanks for coming to my blog! Here is a list of things I mentioned during my podcast appearance on Talking To Women About Videogames.
Good To See You Wallenby by Kwikspell, I adore this album
How Airplanes Fly, just any of his stuff
Revisionist History by The Whomping Willows, and if you dig that, check out III
Ludo Bagman and the Trash, a band from the point of view of a minor character not in the movies, and they always perform with a paper bag on their head
I’d like to specifically shout-out Bisexual Harry’s merch, where you can get your Abolish Azkaban t-shirts and stickers featuring a bong and the philosopher’s stone
Pomona by Kathryn Hoss
Wizard Anarchy by Candle Wix
Totally Knuts just wrapped up their five-part album cycle making every named character LGBTQ. There’s a two and a half minute song about Orla Quirke receiving gender validation from the Mirror of Erised. Do you know who Orla Quirke is, fans of lovely Jonathan? Of course you don’t!
wizardrock.bandcamp.com contains the yearly community sampler, each one is a smorgasboard of interesting ideas and sounds;
if you’d like a more themed or guided intro to wizard rock, I cannot recommend highly enough the podcast WZRD – just find an episode with a theme that seems interesting and give it a spin! There’s also a radio that plays the episodes so you can just dip in and check out random songs!
German band Pottorhead just released 2023, a 20 track album of 23-second songs that might be up the alley of those who enjoy interstitials,
and I would like to personally plug Wizards Give A Shit!, a charity compilation album I organized that benefits the Colorectal Cancer Alliance and local gender center TransActive, where the rule was that every song needed to be about poop, or butts, or toilets in some way. I am extremely proud of that album, everyone did great work. Lastly, I want to mention the song “Hermione Granger’s Not A Transphobe” by Kathryn Hoss, which was used as the outro for my segment.
Here are some last plugs that I didn’t even try to fit into my shpeil! It’s Intersectional by Abby Ritter (seriously, there are multiple gems in every annual wrock sampler), WZRD by Ashley Hamel (this one is an album and not a podcast, but it is an album that is stylized as a radio broadcast and also I talked about it here), and Lumos by the grandfathers of wizard rock, Harry and the Potters. There is so much to say about Lumos, but we shall be sufficed to know that this is their long-awaited Deathly Hallows album, released over a decade after the book, and it is Harry and the Potters at their most political, most musically polished, and best. Oh, and of course I must mention Wizards and Muggles Rock For Social Justice Volume 1, one of the few albums that got me through my last year of high school (and boy, I had to make it count).
The above list I believe gives you a good, and very queer overview of wizard rock through the years, with a focus on the more recent and political. If you still have questions about wizard rock, the Harry Potter fandom, and how and why we love something with so many problematic elements within and without the text, you can always email me at wrocksnob@gmail.com. These are questions I take very seriously and have ruminated upon a bunch over the past few years. I may get back to you! Oh, and I recommend my most recently published post. It’s an in-depth look at a single wizard rock song about a magical tree leaving her ghost crush and putting her soul into the body of a touring American musician, that also includes a history lesson on worker’s rights in Australia and maybe my favorite sentence that I’ve ever written. Weirdly, while I didn’t plan it this way, it provides a decent overview of many of the questions surrounding Harry Potter and wizard rock mentioned above and on the podcast. If you click on one link in this article, click on a link that leads you to someone else’s work because you’ve already dealt with enough of my bullshit – but if you click on a second link, try this one.
Thanks for listening, thanks for reading, and remember! You’re a lovely toilet, pudding.
Wrock Snob out.
The Wrock Snob 