Quench your thirst for wizhop by falling under the enchantment of Aguamenti, your friendly neighborhood non-binary wizard rapper! For an upwards of three years, Aguamenti delivered wizard rap with fresh flows and polished production, including 9 solo tracks, 5 collaborations, and an unreleased album.

The Tracks

Aguamenti debuted on the Wizards Give A Shit! album with Tummy Probs. Although it features their simplest beat and song structure, the lyrics are multilayered, politically charged, and quite brilliant, illustrative of Aguamenti’s coming career.

See, Wizards Give A Shit! is a 2019 wizard rock compilation about poop, benefitting the TransActive Gender Center and the Colorectal Cancer Alliance. Aguamenti’s contribution is about the Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes product U-No-Poo, simultaneously a joke and a protest. In the Second Wizarding War, this Wizard Wheeze is more than just a Wizard Wheeze – and so is this wizard rap.

Laughter helps to cope with this shit

A month later, Aguamenti really hit their stride with their first single. Years in the making, Not My Minister is their response to former President Trump – and the rage is palpable.

With this track, Aguamenti continues wrock’s long tradition of using Harry Potter metaphors to help people understand real-world fascist threats. In true fan-activist fashion – and with the understanding that mass movements are how we bring about social change – the chorus includes a call to direct action to “take it to the streets.”

On the 2019 Wizard Rock Sampler, Aguamenti tells the story of a Slytherin crushing on Hermione in a gay way in Sapphic Magic. The bubbly beat evokes butterflies in the stomach, and a lyric about boundaries and relationship safety critically explores consent in a way that’s missing in canon.

Unsurprisingly, Aguamenti’s 2020 music focuses on the author’s transphobic diatribes, beginning with the incredibly improvised JKR Freestyle. Aguamenti gives a fire analysis of JKR’s trans-exclusionary “feminism,” including the bogus claim to be defending women when she is fueling and funding violence against the most vulnerable women.

A few months later, Aguamenti released their scripted thoughts about the author on the 2020 Wizard Rock Sampler. With a celebratory sound and lyrics, I’m Magic is in many ways a counterspell to JKR’s bigotry. The first verse explores what Harry Potter meant to them as a child and how it helped them find their queer identity. Many queer fans can relate to the experience of growing up with Harry Potter and using its magic to imagine themselves into being. The crucial thing is that each of these encounters between fan and art transform it into something else. As Aguamenti says, “There’s a point in time where it’s no longer hers and it’s ours.”

The books made me hella gay

The second verse is about exactly this: fandom’s independence from and uprising against the author, a bold reclaiming of ownership over the transformed art. The song itself is a transformative fanwork, using the language of Harry Potter to express themself and queer our collective story. Catch me listening to I’m Magic on the way to Pride with the windows down.

And then there’s the story of a rogue queer in the Department of Mysteries! The Transfiguration compilation for trans rights was my introduction to wrock and I was blown away by Unspeakable. Marginalized in a university-like setting with institutional erasure of queer epistemologies, Aguamenti says fuck the rules and makes good trouble.

Aguamenti appears on 3 compilations of 2021. In King of Cats on Stalking the Halls, they rap about Crookshanks over beatboxing by Candle Wix. On the Wizrocklopedia Compilation Club exclusive album Back to the Beginning, Aguamenti’s Origin Story is just that. They tell how they lived through the books along with Harry, finding a haven from their conservative household. Finally, the amazing RAB (Overflow Remix) on Wizard Rock Sampler 2021 expands Totally Knuts’s RAB.

In 2021, we also got the single September 1st, a laid back tune in which Aguamenti tells some first years on the Hogwarts Express what they can expect. Whenever I hear this song, all I can think of is this lovely time-lapse from behind-the-scenes of The Wizard Rocker zine.

Their final single is Inner Dialogues on Alphabet Soup (Wizrocklopedia Compilation Club exclusive), a queer love story between a Slytherin and a Ravenclaw. Like Sapphic Magic and Origin Story, Inner Dialogues vividly depicts Aguamenti inserting themself into the magical world. We make our own representation.

Aguamenti produced the beats for The Bi Who Lived, The Wrevival Wrap, and Sorcerers Stoned by Bisexual Harry. They also conceptualized and co-wrote Sorcerers Stoned. From their unreleased album Wixfluent (Merlin, how I love that title!), I only heard Trelawney, a groovy track about Divination with really tight bars.

In Summary

Aguamenti’s wizard rap is a defiant response to the bigotry of the Trump administration and the TERF-pocalypse. Like many before them, Aguamenti uses the magic of wrock to speak truth to power.

In the final weeks of their career, we were working closely on Sorcerers Stoned (the document was titled “Aguamenti + Bisexual Harry = MAGIC”) and imagining exciting plans for nonbinary wizard rap. I feel blessed to have been mentored by Aguamenti for that shining moment, and to have a community at my back to carry forward the vision.

 

If you love Aguamenti too, drop your favorite bars in the comments!