Meredith Railton

I don’t listen to Wizard Rock; I’ll say it straight up. I’ve known it’s been out there for years, but I never got into it. I never really got into because I’d only ever heard a few lines, and while I thought it was amusing, it never went farther then that. Do I think it’s bad music? Well, I haven’t heard enough of it to have an opinion on its quality. But I do have an opinion on it in general: it’s the single best thing - other than the fandom itself - to come out of the Harry Potter fandom.
I don’t mean to generalize, but anyone who doesn’t like music is a freak. Seriously, no offense to the Bella Swan’s out there (oh, who am I kidding? Yes, offense!), but really; music is pretty great. Every culture has a form of music unique to that culture, and a great deal of music transcends those cultural boundaries and is known and acclaimed worldwide, binding people of all different ethnicities together. That being said, music is the form of pop culture, in my opinion, that brings more people together than anything else.
Yeah, not everyone likes every form of music. Personally, I hate all forms of country music (minus Shania Twain), Christian music, and most rap. But just because I pretty much despise all those types of music, I don’t think they should die and become extinct. Those music genres have their own fans, and those fans deserve to have music that they can enjoy and love. See, everyone’s got different tastes, and everyone deserves to have a form of music that fits their tastes. Everyone relates to music in a different way, whether it’s for pure entertainment, as an active form of expression, or to relate to how they’re feeling.
I’m going to delve into another form of pop culture as an example of how music expresses feeling – TV. Now, I’m not a big fan of musical episodes in television (I don’t really like the cheese factor that’s usually involved), but there is one sole exception. There’s this lovely episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (titled “Once More, With Feeling”) in which a demon infuses a town with music, and everyone starts singing and dancing. Not only was this a highly entertaining episode of TV, it was also a fantastic example of how music is all about feelings. The genius creator of the show decided that music was best way for the characters in that episode to express their innermost feelings that they’d been holding in (some to the point of combustion), and that’s what singer/songwriters do in real life. They make music that expresses their emotions, and a lot of their fans end up relating to those emotions. Plain and simple, music is an expression of feeling, and I don’t think there’s any logical argument against that.
That’s why Wizard Rock is so incredibly awesome. Okay, my knowledge on Wizard Rock goes about as far as a few band names and some guy named Alex, but just because I don’t listen to it doesn’t mean I don’t love it, because I do. It exists because a few people were so passionate about Harry Potter that they turned to music to express that, and what better way to showcase your extreme fanaticism for this series than music? Now it’s turned into one of the staples of this community and is almost completely unique to the Harry Potter fandom. And that’s why all the other fandoms can suck it – we wrock.