And thus our wizard rock tour of the world concludes as we head home to The Greatest Nation On Earth: ‘MURICA. And in honor of our first Snobby Sunday set in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Even More Free Like Wow You Have No Idea Just Look At How Much Free We Have (No Not The Swimming Anime), we’re going to take a look at my second-favorite wizard rap artist – Fawkes.

Fawkes is a one-man self-proclaimed “hip-hop enigma” hailing from Illinois, which is a state that, and I have this under good authority, does indeed exist. Only five songs were ever released, four in 2008, and a demo of an upcoming track in 2010 that never came to fruition, but they are almost all universally great.

“Flying Cars” is a sample-heavy track with (for wizard rap) wicked-fast delivery, a synth-organ beat, and the line “Unless you can master Expecto Patronum / Conjure the light and you can 1337 pwn them”, which is one of my favorite rhymes in all of wizard rock (for those not in the dumb parts of the internet back in 2005 or whatever, 1337 is pronounced “leet”). As far as the story of the song goes, it’s a fairly standard track about Harry Potter and how he’s cool, but it’s a fun party-style song with a really fun bridge involving the word “booty”.

“I Play With Spiders” pushes the lyrics game up a notch, with what again basically amounts to a braggadocio party rap about how awesome a character is, but this time it’s not the protagonist of the series, but none other than Rubeus Hagrid, and this song is hot. The beat is driving and tight as hell, sounding like it would score a breakneck flying motorcycle chase very well, Fawkes’ flow is hot and on point, and the lyrics masterfully blend hip-hop cliches (riding whips, gang vocals consisting of only the word “hey”, funky beat breakdowns, etc) with Harry Potter nerdiness.

“Gears and Cranks” is not as good as the other tracks, but it contains an interesting idea, and one that I would like to see happen more often in wizard rock – fanfic as song. In Part One of this epic musical saga, we are told that muggles were introduced to the wizarding world, and they took a shine to quidditch, but not being magical, they couldn’t fly brooms. So, the muggles invent a team of killer robots to play quidditch and sweep the cup, to the horror of wizards everywhere. The story is clever and amusing, but Fawkes’ delivery is slower and weaker, with some sketchy scansion here and there.

However, it sets up the absolutely killer conclusion to the Robot Quidditch Saga, “Broomstick and Apparations”. The song catches you right off the bat with a super-catchy beat and interesting robotic-ish voice samples, and then the track just explodes with a volley of hostile lyrics about the wizarding world banding together to use their various modes of transportation – flying, apparation, and even dragons – to attack a flying army of robots. In the words of Bill Nye the Science Guy, if you don’t think that’s the tightest shiz then get out of my face.

The lyrics do not depict the battle in detail, but the song acts more as background to and a get-on-your-feet rallying cry for the battle, as exemplified in the absolutely fist-pumping chorus:

Now it’s time to amplify

The sonic waves that create our battle cry

And travel by

Broomsticks and apparations

Put your hands in the air for the wizard nation!

Every time I listen to this song, no matter what, I get pumped as all hell, and usually end up punching at least five different species of local wildlife in the face.

These songs were all released in the span of a few months in 2008, but then a promising wizard rap career suddenly fell dark, and we heard nothing from Fawkes until 2010, when he released the oddly all-caps‘d “MOBIUS PREVIEW”, a somewhat disappointing little snippet of fast but not entirely intelligible lyrics over a rather uninteresting beat constructed out of Garageband loops. I’ve listened to it multiple times and I still can’t tell you what it’s really about, or why you should listen to it. Still, it’s just an obviously quickly-recorded demo, but since that surprise burst of activity, Fawkes has been functionally dead for three years, and I highly doubt we’ll ever see more tunes from him again.

Still, he left us with three and half absolutely excellent songs, and if you are at all interested in the sub-genre of wizard rap, you owe it to yourself to check him out.