This weekend, students’ champion in the War on Fun was not Roar-ee or Alma Mater or any campus face at all. It was the favorite wizard of proud and closeted nerds alike: Harry Potter.
On Saturday night, wizard rock band Harry and the Potters, otherwise known as brothers Paul and Joe DeGeorge, played a concert in Roone Arledge Auditorium in anticipation of the release of the new Harry Potter movie, with Columbia College Student Council for the class of 2013 as the event’s primary sponsor. The 750 tickets sold out that day to a mixed crowd of students, primarily divided between the robe-wearing, wand-carrying types and the uninitiated, who were milling about anxiously in their midterm-week best.
Wizard rock is a genre of music built entirely around the fictional, magical universe of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. It is, to say the very least, a genre that owes its success to the geekier impulses of literary nerds. Coincidentally or not, it was also responsible for one of the most popular on-campus music events of the year.
Backstage in a pre-concert interview, the DeGeorge brothers discussed how their humble idea—writing seven or eight songs from Harry Potter’s perspective one day while goofing off at home and then playing them for friends—snowballed into something much larger, especially among college students.
The band’s central conceit is that each brother plays one version of Harry at different points in time, with Paul as Harry in year seven and Joe as Harry in year four. “That way we didn’t fight over who got to be Harry,” Joe, the younger of the two and the band’s keyboardist, said.
When the band started, the brothers only expected to be playing for kids in libraries, but Harry Potter ended up being more than just a face from a children’s book series for the band and for a much older fan base.
“Harry Potter’s character—he has a punk rock mentality,” Joe said. “He has problems with authority. He organized his own Dumbledore’s Army to fight the administration that way.”
Columbia, they hoped, would find such spirit in their music. “We’re hoping to help you guys wage the War on Fun,” guitarist Paul said. “We’ve been hearing a lot about it,” he added, which they gained primarily from conversations with their old friend, campus musician Tony Gong, SEAS ’11, a former Spectator opinion columnist and the opening act for Saturday’s show.
During their 27-song set, Harry and the Potters kept the numbers almost exclusively loud and up-tempo, with the DeGeorges demanding that the crowd continuously raise its energy with their kicking, jumping, and chanting. Their incantatory song “I am Harry Potter,” which closed the show, channeled that excitement exactly—students banged their heads and yelled, “Harry Potter!” over and over along with a majority of the chorus.
With songs like “I am Harry Potter,” and even another titled “Smoochy Smoochy Pukey Pukey,” it’s easy to wonder how much irony informs their songwriting. The band said that its music always seeks to be in tune with the ridiculousness and playfulness of the wizarding world.
“Irony is a big part of what we do, but it’s an affectionate irony,” Paul said. “It’s irreverently reverent.”
Ryan Mandelbaum, CC ’13 and the CCSC representative responsible for organizing the event, chalked a fair portion of the campus hype up to these attitudes. “It’s almost nostalgic to have a band like Harry and the Potters play,” he said, speaking about the significant role Harry Potter played in Columbians’ lives in the past and how that resonates now. “Everyone at Columbia does everything with a tinge of irony.”
For opener Gong, a Postcrypt Coffeehouse regular, his “clever yet heartfelt lo-fi” act also plays on the dichotomy of ironic humor and earnestness.
“My music is a little more soaked in irony,” Gong said, comparing his songs to Harry and the Potters songs. He continued: “The thing is that I think I just have a lot of feelings and I still do. Music just seemed like a natural medium for all of my feelings.”
Gong, on acoustic guitar and lead vocals, was joined on stage by Rob Post, SEAS ’11, on melodica and Ben Weiner, CC ’11, on kalimba to perform together as Tony and the Gongs (and for two songs written by the other members, as Ben and the Weiners and Rob and the Posts).
Gong first met the DeGeorges when he was 14 and had seen Harry and the Potters perform at one of their first shows at a Boston area library. Gong gave them a CD of the first 10 songs he wrote, and they formed a friendship both inside and outside their music—he has opened for the duo three or four times before, and attends their annual Christmas party. At Saturday’s event, the band dedicated 11 out of 27 songs to Gong.
“A major part of their aesthetic is an inclusive, do-it-yourself, underground feeling,” Gong said. “They don’t take themselves too seriously, which is why I think we sort of attracted each other, because I don’t take my music that seriously either.”
True to this ideology, Gong performed “My Psychiatrist,” a song about wanting to skip “right to the sex part” when meeting with his attractive shrink. But he also incorporated “Boyfriend Material” into his set, a quiet, crooning, half-sad, and half-silly number advertising his winsome quirks and qualities to anyone who will listen.
Harry and the Potters, too, tapped into their more earnest core with their choice to play the slow, heartfelt “The Weapon.” The very students who were doing the twist five minutes before to a song about Hagrid’s beard were then hugging and swaying in small clusters.
“As artists, we try to make stuff that everybody can enjoy,” Paul said of dealing with such a niche genre. But, at the same time, they write for each other—Joe said they’ll come to each other with an idea they think will make the other laugh, and that’s oftentimes how their songs are born.
Because, when it comes to music, their philosophy is to just do it—“like Nike says,” Paul added.
“Don’t be afraid of being yourself,” Joe concluded. He paused, and then Paul chimed in quickly, “Or of being Harry Potter.”
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