The fourth Harry Potter movie has descended upon theaters, to the glee of kids, book-lovers, Harry-lovers, and nyerds everywhere. Last night I went and saw the film, and I was entertained. I like the Potter movies because I like seeing all this fantastic stuff depicted so realistically. I mean, that horny-dragon looks like a real damn horny-dragon! When Harry flies around the big castle school on a fancy broom, it looks like he's really flyin' around the big castle school on a fancy broom! And that's something I don't have the priveledge of seeing in my day-to-day life, unfortunately. I haven't kept up with the novels. I read the first two, but lost interest a quarter into the third book. But who needs to read the books when the movies are this good?? Actually, I didn't see episode three, whatever it was called. Harry Potter and the Laurel of Starbuckle, wasn't it?
Little did I know that this fourth movie installment held a little nugget, a special golden snatch for weirdos like me to notice and appreciate. ...Er, snitch, sorry. Now that Harry Potter and his little crew of rule-breakers are getting older, the story is incorporating more opportunities for the characters to interact in awkward adolescent-sexual-tension-rooted-confusion-driven situations. Which means - school dance! That's right, it's a good ol' fashioned coming-of-age mandatory dance/prom/ball sequence, complete with crying and regret and beautiful angst. These sequences are not complete, however, without an ignorable rock band jamming away in the background (both musically and visually). I normally expect something lame here, as filmmakers would rather get some fresh-faced young actors to pretend like they're musicians rather than hiring, say, Jarvis Cocker to seranade the teens. But friends, I'll be damned if Jarvis himself doesn't come jerking up to the microphone, right there, onscreen, in the Harry Potter movie.
Jarvis Cocker, Wizard
Imagine my surprise and glee to see one of my heroes return from obscurity as a singer in a Wizard Band! How absurd! How ridiculous! How awesome! He really only gets about 2 seconds of screen time, but it's enough for Pulp fans to cry out "Jesus shit! It's Jarvis!" to all the parents and little kids in the theater. While the beautiful angst is being played out onscreen, I noticed that some of the tunes being put out by the band weren't half bad, so upon returning home I promptly downloaded the songs. And guess what? The songs by the Wizard Band are all about...Wizard stuff! Magic Works is about last dances...with magic! This is the Night has a bunch of allusions to dark magical dabblings! And Do the Hippogriff, wonderfully bad, features the lyric "boogie down like a unicorn." What the hell is a Hippogriff, you ask? Well, I Googled it and came up with this picture:
The song asks if you can dance like one of those.
I further discovered that the band's name, which doesn't even get mentioned in the film, is the Weird Sisters and includes Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood and Phil Selway. Upon further research I also found that the name of Jarvis's character is Myron Wagtail, and I guess Greenwood plays Kirley MacCormack Duke, which are pretty rad names. Actually, the songs would be worth downloading solely for the bizarre sounds Greenwood evokes from his guitar.
Black Sabbath and Jimmy Page: No joke??
Of course, this idea of a Wizard Band brought to mind several questions: do they use magic to play better? Do they get strung out on Wizard drugs? Is their audience purely wizard-based, or do they have a market with the muggle demographic? And, according to the Harry Potter universe, how many rock stars who have said they were wizards actually were? Jimmy Page, Marc Bolan, Jim Morrison, Ozzy Osbourne... Maybe they all went to Hogwarts.
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