moonspinner55 There's nothing captivating--or, at the very least, enlightening--about the No Wave movement which started in New York City's East Village/SoHo District in the mid-1970s as a non-commercial, non-melodic answer to glam rock and punk. Skittering through a brief history of the music--which includes vintage footage and new interviews with pioneers Lydia Lunch and members of Teenage Jesus, Swans, Suicide, Theoretical Girls, and '80s torch-bearers Sonic Youth--amateur auteur Scott Crary avoids overtures to nostalgia while demonstrating what was so enticing to these musicians about being completely out of the mainstream: they were free to do their own thing while (unintentionally, perhaps) cementing an art-rock off-shoot. But Crary can't wait to get up-to-date with the new bands carrying on and, unfortunately for his film, few of the 20-somethings who hit the stage can barely formulate a concise thought much less create a riff. Though based in Brooklyn, the lead singer for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs talks like a Valley Girl from Sherman Oaks. "And, um, it's like...well, when we...I mean, you know..." Lydia Lunch is correct when she says the No Wave movement has become softened through homogenization; the veteran bands were fighting the bourgeois, middle-class aesthetic, but I have no idea what is driving this new generation (the kids have the atonal rage down pat, yet show no interest in the music's history, no appreciation of the communication between audience and performer). There are one or two funny insights dropped along the way (who wouldn't want to listen to Lalo Schifrin over Black Dice?), but otherwise this documentary does the opposite of what I assume Crary was trying to accomplish: it makes the No Wavers of today look like vapid substitutes desperately in need of a thesaurus. *1/2 from ****

John Seal Growing up punk rock on the west coast in the 1970s, the New York scene seemed like a very exotic (and distant) flower indeed. This documentary does a half way decent job of documenting that scene and its influence on NY alterna-rock circa 2002. The interviews are great (especially Lydia Lunch and Michael Gira) and there's some stunning footage, BUT: I would dearly have loved to have seen complete performances instead of excerpts of Teenage Jesus, DNA, Suicide, and The Contortions. And speaking of which , where's James Chance--is he simply not speaking about the old days, or did the filmmakers simply drop the ball? As for the contempo bands, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs do seem to be carrying on the No Wave spirit to best effect, but Karen O is either one of the dimmest bulbs on the Christmas tree or just a terrible interview subject. All in all, Kill Y(ou)r Idols does just enough--but only barely.

tim-nicholas-1 For starters, the first half of the film provides a fairly decent overview of the No-Wave "scene." For those who have never heard of no-wave before, it might jump into things too quickly, and could have probably done a better job relating it to the culture at large, but the interviews were compelling and the footage excellent, so I'm not going to complain too much. What did bother me, however, was the editing. The director takes far too much liberty in slicing and dicing in the middle of sentences and cutting back and forth between different speakers that it's impossible to tell exactly what anyone is talking about. It all feels very manipulative. This only becomes blatantly obvious as the film progresses, however. The second half of the film focuses on the modern day bands which have been influenced by the bands discussed in the first half. Here is where the film falters. The overview of these bands is short and leaves much to be desired. Not only is no evidence given to suggest that this selection of bands are in any way connected to each other as the no-wave bands were (for the record, most of them are not), but very little evidence is given to show how they were influenced by that group. Knowing many of these bands prior to seeing the film, I can obviously see that a band like The Liars has been profoundly influenced by no-wave. But Yeah Yeah Yeahs and especially Gogol Bordello seem like a huge stretch. At this point, the film essentially stops being informative and begins to do nothing more than bash the modern day bands. Lydia Lunch gives a particularly scathing indictment, and the interviews of the bands themselves seem to back up the no-wavers' claims that they're not much more than fashionable posers. (A.R.E. Weapons come off as exceptionally naive and stupid, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O is merely a horrible interviewee, littering every statement with countless "um"s and "ya know"s ; Gogol Bordello and to a lesser extent, Black Dice, provide the most intelligent insights of the bunch) I wish the contemporary groups had more of a chance to defend themselves without being edited into stupidity, and I wish the film had asked some interesting questions about the influence of no-wave and the future of independent music, instead of just going with a boring angle of "it was better back in the day".

musidorus-1 In the first half of this great documentary, we meet the former members of the 70's and early '80s New York no-wave scene which included Suicide, Lydia Lunch, DNA, Theoretical Girls, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Swans, and Sonic Youth. We learn how truly underground and chaotic their thing was; they took punk to an extreme that the more familiar NY bands (Dead Boys, Ramones, etc) never dared. This was anti-music, atonal and extreme, but very much in step with the punk ethos of breaking down the barrier between artist and audience. These were some truly desperate and alienated human beings raging out with the only means available to them. The docu features original on-stage footage filmed in tiny clubs as they shrieked, abused guitars, and pounded away in desperation. Whether or not you like that sort of thing, the scene's urgency and authenticity spoke for itself.Fast forward to the 21st century. For some reason the post-punk/no-wave shtick is fashionable again, and we meet the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Liars, Black Dice, and a few others. This is a selection of artists who happen to be in line, on some level, with the no-wave aesthetic- but as anyone who's been following recent pop trends knows, they exist within a larger musical and cultural context obsessed with late 70s/ early 80s rock culture in general. They tell us a little about gigging it the Apple today and how impressed they are with their forebears. That's about all. However, the original interviewees haven't gone away; somehow they're still alive and it's when they express their opinions on the new scene that the film really changes pace.Yes, the film's second half amounts to one of the most severe ass-beatings ever recorded. They're quite remorseless; Lydia Lunch is particularly scorching in her assessment. Pretty much all of the original interviewees express their contempt for current-day trendies and scenesters who have nothing to say and simply want to feed off the past (whilst wallowing in the fashion, of course). To be sure, the two scenes stand in sharp contrast; the old zeitgeist of alienation, risks, originality, and zero recognition is a bit different from today's skin-deep New York that can spawn the Strokes and hype them up into superstar status before anyone's heard them. It was amusing for me to see this film at a film festival because I saw it in a room full of young hipsters who came expecting to be flattered and instead must have felt that they received a big slap in the face. There was a palpable tension in the air…Fortunately the documentary doesn't set it all up as us vs. them, old scene vs. new scene. A glimpse of hope comes from the band Gogol Bordello and its leader Eugene Hutz, who emigrated from the Ukraine and play weird gypsy punk cabaret music in a downtown Manhattan joint. They're the only one of the crop of young bands featured here that seems to agree with Lunch and the rest that culture should look forward instead of backward.Anyway, as you walk out of the theatre, your heart torn out and your punky haircut about to collapse in a shambles of postmodern anxiety, don't be too hard on yourself. No, let me rephrase that. Be as hard on yourself as possible and don't try to escape the film's point; it'll come back to haunt you. But, it's not too late to change. When you wake up the next morning, you just might find the courage to do something that's actually original.