Kill Your Idols

Taking its title from a key track by the NYC noise band Sonic Youth, S.A. Crary's documentary about No Wave music and its paradoxical influence is both a history of music that sought to defy history and a sharp look at the crisis of innovation in an age of commodified nostalgia. In the late 1970s a smattering of New York City bands, including Lydia Lunch's Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, DNA, Theoretical Girls and the Contortions, attempted to make good on punk's failed promise to destroy rock and roll by consciously and perversely rejecting the very influences that inspired them to make music in the first place. Unable, or more to the point, unwilling to sing or ...