Friday Tchotchke #25: Harry Potter and the Viral Glam Rockers
Pandering only feels good when you're the one being pandered to
The post on an anonymous fan forum caught my eye immediately:
I respect the hustle, but finding a new glam rock group that sounds good just to discover they have decided to base their entire marketing around having gone viral for being Marauders fancasts sure has been... huh. Interesting.
What? WHAT????
A reply in the thread provided a name for the band, and a few click quicks to their TikTok had the whole story laid out in front of me.
Royal Sugar, a four-piece fronted by Tyler Cohenour (long dark hair, the “glam”) and his bassist and “musical soulmate” Garett Carr (short light hair, the “rock”), plus two other guys I guess, stumbled upon their secret to success sometime in 2023: a resemblance to fan headcanon versions of Wolfstar, a.k.a. Sirius Black/Remus Lupin, the central pairing of the Marauders fandom, a subset of the larger Harry Potter community.
In an article for Polygon earlier this year, I wrote about how the thriving Marauders subculture presents a chance for fans to play in the fertile world of Harry Potter at a safe distance from its controversial author: “The Marauders are just far enough from Harry Potter proper for fans to feel some ownership of the elements of the world that they played a part in creating.”
Royal Sugar definitely struck gold when the Marauders fandom found them. And while the band is clearly embracing it wholeheartedly, I do sense the hand of a true girlie in all of this. In one video from August, a woman’s voice from behind the camera prompts Tyler to sing “You Give Love A Bad Name,” in response to an enthusiastic fan comment declaring “that is sirius black that is.”
The pace at which videos roll out, their casual, lingo-filled tone, and their general content approach (even before the Marauders turning point) speaks of a very smart social media manager and/or girlfriend who understands the weak spots in the psyche of slash-shipping teen girls on TikTok. I doubt the band members themselves would have been as confident as this hypothetical Mystery Manager in the market value of a comment left on one of their videos over the summer: “you really should target the marauders fandom, you'd get loads of views ngl.”
The advice, however, was taken—immediately, and to extremes. Instead of referencing Queen, Bowie, and Led Zeppelin as they had been before, nearly every one of Royal Sugar’s videos after July was Wolfstar or Marauders related. The algorithm immediately caught on, and began launching them to new heights. Hundreds of fan comments gushed over their resemblance to Remus and Sirius, egging them on, clearly getting a complete and total headrush from not only the initial resemblance but Tyler and Garett’s willingness to play along.
Their willingness is unsurprising. No shade, but Royal Sugar is not an incredible band. Sure, they’re cute, but no cuter than the hundreds of other pop-rockers cutting their teeth in Nashville trying to churn out radio hits on an assembly line second only to Los Angeles for its industrial-strength competitiveness. The music is like… fine. Listenable. Playlistable. It’s glam rock in the same way that La Croix is fruit juice: there are hints at homage hidden amidst the fizz.
But they clearly aren’t going to break big on the strength of their songwriting alone (few bands are!) and they’re savvy enough to understand that, and to instead spend hours hamming it up in front of phone cameras, tagging every video with #marauders and #wolfstartok, ad nauseum.
If you were conscious in the 2000s and aware even tangentially of the breadth of Harry Potter fandom, you probably remember hearing about Wrock, a.k.a. Wizard Rock, a musical genre which boasted main players like Harry and the Potters and The Parselmouths. Unlike filk, the fannish genre which had its origins in convention folk singing circles and parody cassettes passed around media fandom in the 70s and 80s, Wizard Rock was concert-based and personality-driven—rock, basically. The bands drummed up fanbases from the larger HP fan community and built up a steady career through touring cons, community centers, and local fan events. (I once went to a Wrock concert in a small meeting room at the Evanston Public Library around 2012.) They had songs like “Voldemort is Awesome” and “Hufflepuff Anthem.” They were fun, but they were definitely a little cringe.
But Royal Sugar isn’t Wrock. They didn’t emerge out of and for the purposes of entertaining an existing fan community; they aren’t using Harry Potter and its world itself as a basis for their music. Instead, they have slotted themselves neatly inside an aesthetic lens bestowed on them by fandom, which takes the onus off of them for the most part and allows them to be both fannish/nerdy (external) and still retain their glam rock cool (internal). The whiff of cringe that emanates from their marketing could be easily waved away if it ever starts to backfire—it isn’t intrinsic, as any born-fannish project has the potential to be. (I include my own fan music in this, of course.)
Wolfstar and the Marauders exist independently of Royal Sugar, a huge fandom community with years of history, seething with erotic energy and as of yet no official (licensed, film or stage) outlet. Any independent artist could theoretically tap into it like Royal Sugar has done, if they get lucky and play their cards right.
Looked at more broadly, this could very well be a new frontier in band marketing. Now of course, homoerotic shipteasing is absolutely not a novel thing in rock music. Stage gay helped Panic! at the Disco and My Chemical Romance stir up devoted fans and made them icons of Bandom in the LiveJournal era. (To say nothing of J-pop and K-pop’s long-standing devotion to the concept.) And fans adopting bands because of coincidental resonances to their obsessions or experiences certainly isn’t new in the age of TikTok—see Mother Mother’s surprise rise.
But Royal Sugar’s specific methodology speaks of a fascinating paradigm shift. You don’t necessarily have to pander to your fans—or the fans you think you should have, as Royal Sugar was doing when they targeted existing glam rock lovers, during the first half of 2023. Instead you can locate an existing fan community, completely independent of your own audience—particularly one with a dearth of audiovisual source material which you are able to compensate for—and develop an aesthetic strategy aimed directly at them.
And let me be clear: that wouldn’t necessarily be bad. All of this pandering kind of feels off to me, and generates all of this lordly objective analysis, because I’m simply not the one being pandered to in this case. Joanna Russ’s eternally relevant observation is useful here as much as anywhere: “Only those for whom a sexual fantasy ‘works,’ that is, those who are aroused by it, have a chance of telling us to what particular set of conditions that fantasy speaks, and can analyze how and why it works and for whom [...] Sexual fantasy that doesn’t arouse is boring, funny, or repellent, and unsympathetic outsiders trying to decode these fantasies (or any others) will make all sorts of mistakes.”
I fully recognize and accept that. Because it’s true! If there was a band out there who kind of looked like doomed polar explorers and were suddenly basing their whole schtick off of that, I would be all up in those comments, going just as uncritically nuts as the Marauders fans are for Royal Sugar’s Tyler and Garett—who are quite honestly heroic for jumping feet first into the brave new world of Wolfstar.
Incidentally I am currently staying in the hotel across the street from the Evanston Public Library.
(I haven’t been into said library since I was a small child, though. Also I vaguely remember the old library that preceded it.)