It'd be a stretch to call the short-lived but immeasurably influential no-wave music that came out of New York in the late '70s and early '80s a scene or a movement. It was more a way of thinking about music that united bands like Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, DNA, Theoretical Girls, and the like, all driven by a desire to create a sound more radical than punk's blues-derived riffs and traditional song structures. The results varied from inspired to godawful, with a thin distinction between the two. As with any radical art, no-wave was more about the theory and emotions behind the noise than its value according to traditional notions of entertainment. Or, as Teenage Jesus And The Jerks' Jim Sclavunos puts it in S.A. Crary's no-wave documentary Kill Your Idols, "We weren't just trying to make music. We were trying to be monsters."
A film in two related parts, Kill Your Idols opens with a summary of the original no-wave artists and forebears like Martin Rev of Suicide (who saw glam rock and went in the opposite direction) and cornerstone Lydia Lunch (who came to New York from a troubled upstate childhood and used noise to exorcise the demons). From there, Crary spends some time with torchbearers Sonic Youth and Swans before segueing into 2002 footage of bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, and Black Dice, which found fame—or at least a few moments of it—building off elements of no-wave and other post-punk styles.
Crary takes the usual talking-heads-and-archival-footage approach, which isn't really a problem, though the film's whirlwind approach is. There's too much ground to cover in the time Crary allows himself, although the quality of the footage he chooses suggests he's just being overly selective. The snippets of the original no-wavers in action is almost priceless as an interview with Lunch in which she disses all the newcomers as trend-driven pretenders.
Whether that accusation is accurate is up for debate, but one of the film's oddest aspects is the way the 2002 footage appears more dated than the scenes from 1978. There's a chatty Karen O looking improbably young and sweet, with no thoughts of her future as a siren-like cipher. And there's A.R.E. Weapons swaggering and boasting about groupies, never guessing that history would pass them by, contrasting sharply with the artists who never thought of making history, but did anyway.