Review of Kill Your Idols

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".