John Bylander

Attention, anybody who still thinks CMJ is about concerts and wild nights: it's time for last call. One final dose of tech, marketing, and legal wisdom will be dispensed to registered attendees during the panel discussions hosted at NYU's Kimmel Student Center all day today. Sure, it starts earlier than usual this time around -- 9am sharp -- but if you decide to just sleep in and stave off last night's hangover, you'll likely spend the next 51 weeks haplessly bumbling around through what's left of the music industry, which I sincerely doubt can handle any more incompetence. Come on down.

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John Bylander

Welp, here we go again--Day 3 of CMJ 2012 serves up 23 music biz panels during the day which are accessible only to people with the all-access badges, followed at night by another frenzied shitstorm of concerts, the best of which probably will decide not to let you in even if you do have one of the damn things. For our money, the finest venue at CMJ is certainly NYU's Kimmel Student Center, on the southern end of Washington Square Park. Won't you join us?

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John Bylander

While you folks were all wearing yourselves out running around between CMJ showcases yesterday, I just guzzled a bunch of free booze at a press-only party and then ran home to giggle at the two boring rich dudes angrily discussing the details of their pension plans on national television. Hope it was worth it, because my own personal energy strategy was to turn in early and rest up for today's daytime programming, easily the highlight of CMJ for those of us who have no idea who the hell any of these bands are. (Pleased to meet you, Milk Dick.) But I bet you've heard of Kickstarter, SoundCloud, and TechCrunch, all of which are sending their top brass to dispense pearls and/or turds of music industry advice at today's panel discussions. No, I won't tell you where to find any of them; instead, please parse your various options using the decision tree we've thoughtfully provided.

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John Bylander

Today marks the start of the CMJ Music Marathon, the annual festival during which zillions of allegedly up-and-coming bands take over Williamsburg and lower Manhattan for the better part of a week to schmooze with various music industry forces and perform at their heavily branded sponsored showcases. This makes it an especially great week for concerts in New York, as you are probably already aware. But those who were lucky enough to score one of the pricey all-access passes also get another lesser-known benefit: admission to an excellent slate of daytime programming, mostly panel discussions and presentations hosted at NYU's Kimmel Student Center, roughly two dozen every day. Since these often go unheralded and thus might be incidental to your existing CMJ plans, we've compiled a handy tool to help you assemble a schedule. See you there.

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Kudos to Capital New York for writing the most thorough piece yet on the great Prime 6/Yo! MTV Raps/Park Slope-is-racist controversy. You recall the online petition, circulated by one Jennifer McMillen, suggesting that Prime 6, a soon-to-be-opened club near the Atlantic Yards nexus, consider playing "indie" music instead of hip-hop, so as to become "a vibrant artistic hub instead of another Yo MTV Raps 'bling-bling' vip club." Hilarious. The online mockery began immediately, even as everyone suspected this was performance art. As indeed Capital pretty much confirms it to be: Two weeks later and no one has heard from -- heard of, really -- any Jennifer McMillen, while Prime 6 proprietor Akiva Ofshtein never really even mentioned hip-hop in the first place. To wit:

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Any excuse to repost this logo again though

For the past week, the controversy over Prime 6, an in-the-works "Yo MTV Raps 'bling-bling' vip club" set to open on 242 Flatbush Avenue, has stayed at the top of our Google Reader and Twitter feeds since "Jennifer McMillen," a woman who claims to live on the same block, created a petition suggesting that the club switch over to indie music, despite the fact that "R&B and rap happen to be [her] two favorite types of music."

Last night Community Board 6 met at Long Island College to discuss this and other, less bloggable matters. Although nothing was voted on (there will be another meeting a week from today), Permits and Licenses Committee head Mark Shames stated the community's position, and did so without having to name-drop his "African American friends and colleagues."

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The real Fab Five Freddy probably neither wrote nor signed any of these petitions, just FYI.

So last week a brave young Park Slope woman named Jennifer McMillen entered the fractious debate over Prime 6, an allegedly hip-hop-friendly club set to open at Flatbush and Sixth in Brooklyn, to the trepidation of some neighbors who feared, in the memorable coinage of her Internet petition on the matter, the presence of "another Yo MTV Raps 'bling-bling' vip club." Despite clarifying that Park Slope is not at all racist, she personally loves rap/r&b, and has several African-American friends, McMillen (whom no one, from the Voice to the Wall Street Journal, has yet been able to find, leaving open the possibility that this is all an elaborate prank) was nonetheless showered with derision, which at first took the form of people signing her petition under amusing fake names (Whitely McWhite, Lou Dobbs, Fab Five Freddy, U Haz No Blak Frenz, etc.), and has now spawned the inevitable: answer petitions. Let's take a closer look at two of them.

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Perhaps you are familiar with Rap Genius, a useful interactive site that aims to "discover the meaning of rap lyrics" by painstakingly explaining every single line of various popular tunes -- at press time Lil Wayne's "Hoes & Ladies" is exactly 13 percent explained, with Rick Ross' "Made Men" at a far more manageable 55 percent. (The homepage also currently bears the headline "Lupe Fiasco: The Proust of Rap," which is super promising.) Anyway, as a random example let's take Das Racist's "All Tan Everything," currently sitting at 82 percent, and a veritable treasure trove of useful data.

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Screenshot by Sir Itzkoff, just to give credit where credit's due

So friend-of-SOTC and general sweet Internet dude Rich Juzwiak recently co-engineered a fantastic montage of Taylor Swift feigning shock when she is given awards; hatched alongside his online cohort Kate Spencer, the clip attracted a great deal of attention, as you might imagine, including from someone at The Tonight Show, who reached out to Rich about it: Jay Leno would be interviewing Taylor very soon, and he'd like to show it to her on the air. Rich agreed, so long as they credited the source. The Jay/Taylor interview aired Monday. You can probably guess what happened.

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It's understandable, your depression/jealousy/irritation at not being physically present in Las Vegas this weekend for Matador Records' bizarrely elaborate Matador at 21 spectacle, featuring just about every major label act you could possibly desire unless you're, like, a die-hard Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 fan. But then again, everyone there either just left NYC (Pavement, Superchunk, Belle & Sebastian) or is showing up here eventually (Guided by Voices in particular, whose "classic lineup" reunion tour began in Dallas (40-song setlist!) this week, and rolls into Terminal 5 next month.) And if that's not enough solace, MySpace is apparently streaming the whole thing, starting tonight with sets from Chavez (also just here), Fucked Up, Sonic Youth, and Pavement. The full schedule:

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