I left New York this morning, as did (I’m sure) many a CMJ visitor, totally exhausted with my head a jumble of band names, member’s faces, and lamanated badges on bright red lanyards. The weekend was good to me. I feel like while I missed an embarassingly large number of really fucking awesome shows, I did get to see a few that were well worth the trip.

I’ve definitely come to the conclusion that badges are in no way a critical element of the CMJ experience, and that the hierarchy of “levels” is really just a superfluous way of allowing industry people to feel better than the college kids for whom the festival is designed. Plus a lot of the shows are 21+ anyway, rendering an underager (read: me), inadmissable, even if they have a badge. The fact of the matter is, if a show isn’t letting in any more badges, it isn’t letting in any more badges, regardless of whatever “level” you paid however much money for. In fact, a lot of the time the only way to get in is to just pay for the ticket outright, and most shows are open to the public anyway. I am, however, going to try my hardest to get my college to buy me a badge next year (if other schools do it, why can’t mine?), because having that safety net of “at least I can get into something” might by nice. And I hear that the actual point of CMJ is a conference or something?

After asking around to see if the panels were even worth going to, most of the students that I talked to who attended are music directors of their campus radio stations or enrolled in semi-bullshit “music business” programs at their primarily east-coast colleges. I say “semi-bullshit” because the vision some of these kids have of the industry (as a result of going to college for “music business”) is that managing labels and booking bands are a perfectable, static science that they are bent on mastering, and many are intensly ambitious ankle-biters who all just want to be head-honcho at a major label by the time they are twenty-five. I sound bitter, but I was more shocked at how cold and unphased they appeared in discussing music, something that’s generally talked about with slightly more reverence. I didn’t actually get the impression that some of the people I talked to even liked music at all, as much as liked the hype and saw it as a possible career direction, slightly better than banking. But my personal aversions to some of the crowd aside, the actual content of the conference portion of CMJ remains a mystery to me.

On Friday I didn’t end up staying where I was to see Deerhunter; The Bowery Presents was having an office party, which at first sounded infinitely less exciting than Bradford Cox wailing in the Christmas-light encircled, egg-crate-ceiling-ed basement of Cake Shop, but turned out to be a blast. Considering Bowery is the hand that fed me guest lists, and I genuinely like my old co-workers, I felt compelled to stay put. That might still be the one regret I have about the weekend (I also missed Essie Jain, this stunning English songwriter on BaDaBing), but missing things is really just the theme of CMJ, and the Bowery party actually had some bands of its own playing in the back of the office: some from the line-up of the venues’ showcases that night. A garbage can was overturned, a waterjug was held underarm, and a whole conference room of industry-types was trying their best to clap in rhythm while grasping various sponsored beverages. Completely bizarre ambience, but all good vibes, and remarkable acoustics considering it was… a conference room.

Again, only at CMJ.

The first band was Alberta Cross, a group of well-dressed, bearded Scandanavians by way of London playing sweetly haunting folk songs with a distinctly old timey, southern American feel: an intriguing concoction that sounded utterly gorgeous. The lead singer impressed me especially: he kept making these perfect slips into falsetto, the kind of hair-raisingly sincere, whispering type, and then would effortlessly slide back out again, backed up by two and sometimes three-part harmonies, all dead-on. It might have been so moving of a performance because of the stripped-down, entirely acoustic nature of the short set: the album I picked up is much more fully realized. But the talent is there: whether the sound is unique or not, they were impeccable performers.

Second was the Felice Brothers, a quartet of crooked-toothed, musty guys who all seemed pretty trashed (at 6pm). But it was the jam: the entire room was clapping and stomping along with their skeezy, soulful ruckus. I wouldn't necessarily encourage anyone to buy any of their records, but they definitely are charistmatic performers. After the room aired out a little, on came Merge Records' The Broken West. With their buoyant pop anthems and sunshiney lyrical hooks, plus more perfect harmonies and a tight sound, I couldn't really dislike them.

Post-performances, I had missed most of the Cake Shop sets, (and my, uh, fake ID doesn't work at any of the other lower east side venues) but I had scored a last-minute ticket to sold-out MIA so I headed to midtown. Terminal 5 had opened just the night before, and is this enormous cavern with two balconies (all open), a vast open space in the middle, and strange, dimly lit nooks in the back. It drew a comparison to some vague recollection I have of an arena in Street Fighter, which I may or may not be imagining: an almost eerily large (3,000 capacity) room with an industrial, modern feel.

M.I.A. is the type of performance well-suited for Terminal 5, what with her crazy backing videos, the constantly firing of shotgun samples, her ridiculous camo/flourescent/metallic outfit and the even more colorful crowd. I was never that into M.I.A. and sort of cast her aside in this category of modern novelty that I felt I didn't care for. But who else can sample New Order, Eurythmics, and Lil' Mama, cover "Whoomp There it Is", and pull it off? It's definitely a schtick, but a good one. The crowd was pumped, the sound of the space full and balanced. My one gripe was that she called people up on stage in the middle of her set for one song, and sent them back to the crowd afterwards. Stage-rushing, even if it needs to be controlled, should always be done at the end. It created this weird tension where the kids wanted to stay and dance, and the security wanted them off, and someone made an awkward announcement to the likes of "get off the stage, so the show can go on" while M.I.A. dodged and ducked around the stage, avoiding the crowd like it was a swarm of bees.

After M.I.A., I was done with shows for the night. Even if it was only midnight, I was (obviously) badgeless, wasn't on the list for anything else, and I'd found out that MSTRKRFT was sold out, and all the afterparties were either expensive or too secret for me to know about.

Last night (Saturday) was the CMJ Grand Finale and for me it was definitely the best night, in terms of lucky breaks, successful concert-hopping, as well as the quality of the showcases experienced. But my brain still hurts, so more on that eventually.