The rat who symbolized 50 Cent at Summer Jam 2005. Ah, memories.

​Verbal insults! Wanton violence! Temper tantrums! Comical jpegs of foes! Mock lynchings live on stage! Sunday brings us another installment of Hot 97 Summer Jam, wherein rap's leading lights get the chance to prove the accuracy of the adage about modern hip-hop being closer to the world of professional wrestling than anything Afrika Bambaataa ever envisaged back in the '70s. So as a glittering lineup of Lil Wayne, Drake, Rick Ross, Wiz Khalifa, and the peculiarly titled Lloyd Banks And Friends—which may just be a titular ruse to get committed Ross enemy 50 Cent into the venue, what with rumors of Curtis being banned from Summer Jam events—all prepare to take the stage this Sunday, here's a far-from-virtuous look back at Summer Jam's most controversial moments.

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​So Sundance 2011, set to invade Utah in January, has announced a lineup that includes, in the documentary category, competing with such works as The Redemption of General Butt Naked, Page One: A year inside the New York Times, and BEING ELMO: A Puppeteer's Journey (ooooh), a long-rumored film titled Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, directed by one Michael Rapaport, because of course it is. A rough trailer leaked online a few days ago and was promptly pulled down; people seem genuinely excited about it. Not among those excited about it is Q-Tip, of A Tribe Called Quest.

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Screaming Females at CMJ, last year. Photo by Rebecca Smeyne.

​In case there was any doubt, it's now official: next week's Pitchfork-sponsored #Offline Festival will have no CMJ affiliation whatsoever. "This is purely a Pitchfork event," a representative for the website told us yesterday: "just putting together a lineup we'd like to see in one spot, convenient, affordable. Kinda like the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago and our showcases at SXSW." That means no badges, no cross-promotion, no cooperation on scheduling, sharing bands, or distributing showcases around the city. It also, if it weren't already obvious, means war--a not-so-small insurgency in the heart of Williamsburg. The rhetoric may be friendly, but the underlying actions are anything but. CMJ is surely dismayed this morning (so far, they've declined to respond to our requests for comment). But this was a long time coming.

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​A tipster passes along a kind of sensational thread from Casey Spooner's Facebook page. Let this not constitute an endorsement: we are fascinated with M.I.A., we think she's had a rough year; we also think probably reports of her rough year have been somewhat exaggerated. She is playing that free show no one really expected her to actually play. She weathered yet another NYC-area hiccup when the power went out around Terminal 5, hours before she was supposed to go on, and did her thing anyway. But there are people who are having trouble forgiving her in 2010, and new to that list is a glittery triumvirate of musicians--Spooner, Luísa Matsushita, a/k/a Lovefoxx from CSS, and Ssion's Cody Critcheloe. You would think these three are likely enough to run into M.I.A. in the near future that they would avoid talking trash. And yet they are. Here's Spooner:

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Rhett Miller, whose name has the misfortune of rhyming with mine

​I knew this day would come. Today via mass email I learned that a piqued local musician -- aliases include CXB, Touching You, and many other charming handles deployed in emails I've been idly skimming for nearly five years -- has written a charming ditty titled "Kill Harvilla," providing both the lyrics and the instrumental MP3. Against my better judgment, I have provided both below, taking the liberty of marking with asterisks those lines I consider to be falsehoods.

Ahem:

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He's got a good slogan and everything

​Mark Mazzye, a 28-year-old graphic designer here in NYC, is one of the unfortunate souls who witnessed M.I.A.'s semi-disastrous headlining set at July's HARD Festival. The one so problematic she promised to do a free show here to make it up to everybody. Except that hasn't happened yet, and she's playing Terminal 5 this Monday. Tickets are not free. (She promises to do the free one as soon as her mother is allowed back into the country.) This has upset some people, including Mark, who has announced his intention to lead a protest outside Terminal 5. He could use some company/publicity, though, and it seemed like a good idea to talk to him about this.

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Marnie Stern will cut you. Photo by David Torch.

​Local guitar wizard Marnie Stern is making a wonderful bid right now to become the Kanye West of indie-rock--she's cocky but shy, confident but self-deprecating, and more musically savvy than she gets credit for, even as she constantly pays homage to her influences and collaborators (such as Hella's Zach Hill) for her increasingly sophisticated sound. Like Kanye, she has a record coming out--due next month on Kill Rock Stars--and like Kanye, she's been in trouble lately for airing her often underwhelmed opinions of her peers in public. But honesty is one of the things Stern excels at, and her latest round of press in advance of her third LP has been a clinic in how artists become more compelling as they speak more bluntly about their life and work. Today, she was interviewed by Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal, and there continued a burgeoning trend of waxing undiplomatically about musicians in the game she doesn't entirely respect. Such as:

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M.I.A. at HARD Fest in July. Photo by Jens Joller.

​M.I.A.'s July HARD Fest imbroglio has now been well documented: the rain and poor sound that torpedoed her set; the ensuing argument over who had failed who; M.I.A.'s subsequent promise to make it up to all those who had been there with a free show in New York; a recent tour announcement that included no such free show; another assurance that it would happen; and, finally, a bewildering caveat -- the United States would have to let her mother back in the country before it did. Throughout the whole back and forth, her partners in the original endeavor -- the organizers of HARD Fest -- had been oddly quiet. That changed last week, as they began retweeting a steady stream of vitriol directed at M.I.A. What's going on between the two camps? We called up HARD Fest owner and organizer Gary Richards and asked.

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Happier times

​"All love, no hate," goes the unofficial slogan of popular, partially NYC-based blog the Music Slut, which nonetheless has lately suffered some profound internal calamity, leading to the abrupt departure of writer/editor Matt Gross in what he calls an out-of-nowhere hijacking and what his former partner, site co-founder Jennifer Kellas, calls the amicable end of several years of conflict. It's a cutthroat industry, folks, or at least more of a cutthroat industry than you'd expect.

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​Well, this will surely be awkward when Sean Penn and Wyclef Jean have to share whatever inevitable Haiti-relief benefit stage in six months from now. Hours after Haiti's electoral council knocked out Wyclef's appeal of their ruling that he couldn't run for their presidency--because he hadn't lived in the country for the requisite five years, and also because, we like to think, he was utterly unqualified for the job--Sean Penn took to the Huffington Post, where he reiterated that "the real and devastating human issues in Haiti must be handled and led by a qualified president's deft hand," not "His Excellency Wyclef Jean." Also: "It is, it seems, folly for we Americans to assume 'our Haitian' is their answer, simply because we enjoy the sense of identification we may feel, or are paid to espouse." Then he makes fun of Clef's non-existent French and Jackie Chan-esque Creole. So remember that, when the two are dueting on "Haiti Mon Amour" for charity next year in front of an embarrassed television audience. [Huffington Post]