Shortly before Sonic Youth made punk rock safe for aesthetes on the East Coast, X did it out on the West Coast, unpretentiously fusing art and music. X's songs were fluidly aggressive but conceptual, ladled from a thick stew seasoned with rockabilly, Catholic icons, artifacts from seedy motel rooms, and droppings from rabid wolves. W.T. Morgan's 1986 documentary The Unheard Music works up a visual analogue to the band's music. Morgan shuffles footage of Los Angeles street life, clips from old TV ads, and photos from the punk clubs of the late '70s, as well as interviews and performances. And Morgan frequently follows his own fascinations, as when he tracks houses moving through downtown on the backs of flatbed trucks, or jumps from a montage of records being pressed to footage of an egg-processing plant.
The Unheard Music gives all four members of X their due, not just moaning thrift-store poet Exene Cervenka and the dapper, deep-voiced John Doe. Morgan covers the Lionel Hampton fandom of drummer D.J. Bonebrake, and the hot-rod fantasies of superhero guitarist Billy Zoom. He gets a few words with a mulleted Ray Manzarek, X's early producer, and talks to L.A. punk scenester Rodney Bingenheimer, seen doing his influential radio show with the help of a visiting Jello Biafra. The film suffers some from having caught the band with its story still unfinished, and not all of Morgan's moody interludes really work, but the collage method pays off when Hampton talks to the MCA executive who turned down X in favor of forgotten '70s hard-rocker Point Blank, and Hampton cuts from Point Blank's publicity photo to an Edsel commercial.