Something interesting happened to filmmaker S.A. Crary on his way to distributing Kill Your Idols, his new documentary about the heritage of New York’s No Wave rock scene–namely, four years.

Idols then and now: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (featuring Lydia Lunch, center) and Liars frontman Angus Andrews (Photo left: Godlis; photo right: Benetta Cucci)
Begun in 2002 with a focus on the city’s Bands of the Moment (Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, A.R.E. Weapons, Black Dice et. al.), Crary soon expanded his scope to include the predecessors (Sonic Youth, Teenage Jesus, Swans et. al.) the younger artists had referenced almost unanimously. A do-it-yourself case study in every way (Crary produced, directed, shot and edited), Kill Your Idols eventually landed 20 festival berths, claiming the Best New York Documentary following its Tribeca premiere in 2004. More than two years later, the film arrives at Cinema Village like an artifact–not dissimilar to Amos Poe’s Blank Generation or Derek Burbidge’s Urgh! A Music War in its timelessness, but also, perhaps by defintition, in thrall to the same derived nostalgia that its contemporary subjects suffer for better or worse.
In the best cases, performance videos of Liars and Yeah Yeah Yeahs encapsulize the resurgence of full-throated clang and clamor that would disappear with each band’s eventual flights from New York (the former to Berlin, the latter to Los Angeles). Crary frames the scene as a moment, reflecting its fragility even as the brash, bitter A.R.E. Weapons and the idealistic Gogol Bordello all but take that moment and its attendant buzz for granted. Interviews with New York legends Lydia Lunch, Arto Lindsay, Michael Gira, Glenn Branca and Thurston Moore emphasize this brittleness to varying degrees. Lindsay’s droll acknowledgment that No Wavers “didn’t have a whole industry selling us back to ourselves” represents the most resonant truth to be had among an aging generation of musicians as inclined to express their influence as they are to dismiss the bands they touched. Lunch in particular cannot abide the thought of another angular New York rock ensemble finding mainstream success, but the only alternative she implies is an even less-inspired imitation of the No Wave ethos: Innovate on the fringe, burn out early and finally achieve wide acclaim 25 years after your prime.
Crary avoids challenging these philosophical ruptures, instead choosing a surprisingly distant objectivity that forgoes the insights of critics, record label executives or the potential fireworks of an old-NY/new-NY face-to-face debate. (The director is on the record as wanting to sidestep didacticism, but the cultural read feels incomplete without, say, Seymour Stein or that fucker Bob Christgau’s grains of salt.) Kill Your Idols also broaches the popularity of ‘zines among the No Wave crowd, but it notably omits any reference at all to the Internet culture that helped enable present-day New York bands to become phenomena in their own time. The film literally stops in spring 2003, with the MySpace/iTunes revolutions in their infancies and Rolling Stone somehow still perceived as the omniscient cultural tastemaker it hasn’t been since the early to mid-1980s.
But even if the film feels unfinished, it does retain fleeting senses of the here-and-now shellshock that followed early Liars and Black Dice performances–those explosive noise-dance interludes you knew you had heard before but which outmuscled your cynicism nevertheless. Kill Your Idols externalizes this duality without adequately exploring its dynamics. Still, as a primer, it exceeds what little documentation we had of early ’00s squawk, and God knows old news is better than unrecorded history.

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