Dir. S A Crary, 2004, USA, 75 mins
Cast: Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, DNA, Swans, Sonic Youth
For fans of alternative music, S A Crary's debut film will provide a valuable insight into the 30 year history of the New York underground scene. It starts right back at its roots in 1972 with the birth of pre-punk noise-merchants Suicide, working its way through to 2002 with the Grammy-nominated Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes. It doesn't forget to cover the eighties art-rock scene which bridges the two eras, with worthy input from Sonic Youth and The Swans. It also offers rare live footage of each band, making it a must-see movie particularly for the fans of the earlier groups like Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, DNA and The Theoretical Girls.
Crary is very straightforward in his directorial approach - the highly chronological narrative is told purely through interviews with the big players and extracts from their live music (or "anti-music" as Teenage Jesus' Gordon Stevenson affectionately calls it). This basic, unpretentious approach to direction is wholly appropriate. Crary made the entire project on a meagre $300 budget, and this DIY approach adds to the authenticity of a movie which makes its point not through Michael Moore-style voiceovers, but by letting the artists do the talking. It is these interviews that make the film so watchable. One highlight is when seventies No-Wave queen Lydia Lunch makes derogatory comments about the current New York scene, which is deliberately juxtaposed with said artists' inflated comments about themselves. Look out for the obnoxious, coke-fuelled egotists A.R.E. Weapons whose interviews are genuinely painful to watch and hear.
Other bands come out badly too. Yeah Yeah Yeahs' frontwoman Karen O appears almost braindead in her comments about her own music, proving the older interviewees right in their statement that the current so-called alternative music scene is purely fashion-based and intellectually redundant. Originators of the NY scene such as Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, DNA and The Swans wanted "to disregard the influences that caused [us] to want to create in the first place". In contrast, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs wanted their debut EP to be "something people listened to as they were getting ready to go out".
As the title suggests, this film is preoccupied with the importance of rejecting the music that went before in an effort to create art that is new and honest. Even though the No-Wave bands could hardly play their instruments, there is no denying from the archival footage that their music was amazing in its raw, threatening and downright deafening originality. By the end of the movie, musical legends such as Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Jim Thirwell from Foetus are left pondering what sort of music could possibly follow the 2002 New York scene that has already drawn heavily from the bands of the seventies and eighties. "Perhaps it will be Yes-Wave", jokes Thurston Moore.
Joking aside, there is a serious and slightly depressing message in this film art-rockumentary. It mourns the death of real, guttural passion in music, a loss inflicted largely by the arrival of commercialism on the NY scene, with overnight successes like The Strokes having their own stylists and being primed for Pepsi ads. With money being the all-important factor to today's bands, what hope is there for the future of 'real music'? Whatever conclusions you decide to draw, you'll find Kill Your Idols to be funny, informative and thought-provoking, providing you already have an interest in progressive music before you watch it.
Nick Jones
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