We've Been Had ( a review of Kill Your Idols)

The best documentaries usually leave the audience with more questions than answers. Sure, the good ones are typically packed with information on the subject matter at hand, and often offer audiences an expanded knowledge base as a launching pad from which they can develop more and better questions in the future. But the filmmakers that realize the limitations of their medium are usually the ones that fare the best, since creating a complete and all encompassing document of a particular subject in a scripted hour and thirty minute film is simply impossible most of the time. Like a college professor, posing a set of challenging questions, a review of possible answers, and the proper information with which to ask better questions is about all that a documentary filmmaker can hope to do, and it is all that an audience can truly expect if they are seeking a sophisticated view of the subject at hand, rather than a shallow quick fix of easy answers.

Kill Your Idols, a documentary about the New York No Wave scene of the late 70's and early 80's, ends with a series of shots showing blank expressions on the faces of a number of its interview subjects, all pondering the possibilities of what the next important movement (after the early 00's New York cool) in popular music will be. Arto Lindsay finally says "I don't know" just before the credits appear, which seems to be the proper way to end a film that paints in broad strokes and presents a lot of questions rather than answers. The beginning of the film provides a brief history of the lower east side/soho New York No Wave movement, covering bands such as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, Suicide and Theoretical Girls. Of course, they leave out several other important groups from that era (they barely mention Contortions, and don't mention Liquid Liquid, ESG and Mars among others), and don't go into a great deal of detail about the dynamics of the scene and the visual art infrastructure that held much of it together (for a much more detailed look at No Wave, I would suggest Simon Reynolds' book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984). But what makes the film interesting is its use of interviews with Arto Lindsay, Lydia Lunch, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo as a segue into a brief look at the lower east side "scene" of 2002, just as Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and ARE Weapons were starting to gain national media attention in the wake of the Strokes/Interpol craze of that year. Seeing these relatively new bands compared with some of the original No Wave acts was interesting for two reasons, although the film didn't directly touch on either in any obvious manner.

The first was the simple fact that a film has been made about the early 00's New York bands at all, considering how recently their sounds and style emerged in the national conscience. Seeing even a brief historical document of that time provided a very tangible notion that the reign of those New York bands and their sound is over, and that the early 00's, much like the early 90's, are now considered history, and will forever be analyzed as such by critics and rock historians. Witnessing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs being interviewed before they had a deal ,and seeing The Strokes "2002 Band of the Year" Spin Magazine cover with the benefit of hindsight revealed how equally silly and exciting those years were. Like it or not, the Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, Radio 4 and others played a very big role in ushering in a sea change in independent and underground music, bringing post punk influences to the forefront, and putting names such as Television, Gang of Four, Joy Division, Human League, Soft Cell and others on the lips of people that didn't know much about that music before they heard Is This It. Regardless of what you think of these bands and their music, this is certainly a very noteworthy development, and one that you could say had a much smaller but somewhat comparable effect to that which Nirvana, Sub Pop and "college rock" had on American culture ten years before. This isn't to say that nothing else happened during this time, or that all or any of these changes were necessarily good, but they are changes, and quite noticeable ones at that. Urban Outfitters, white belts, mass marketed 20 dollar thrift store shirts, Vice Magazine (at least its current incarnation) and a wide range of other styles in music, fashion, and perhaps even visual art can all be connected back to the early 00's New York scene, and you can thank the Strokes for The Killers and The Bravery as much as you can thank Nirvana for Creed and Candlebox.

The second interesting aspect of the film revolves around Arto Lindsay's comment that the bands of his era "didn't have an industry selling us back to ourselves." In the film, Lee Ranaldo recalls being on tour in Japan (I believe) in 2001 and getting all kinds of questions from fans about the great new New York band The Strokes. The problem was that he had never heard of them, and felt like he didn't even know who they were until some time after people all over the country had heard their music, implying that much of the mystique surrounding the Strokes as this great underground New York band was basically manufactured. Looking back, this kind of makes sense. You don't hear much about the Strokes and Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs building up an audience in the city before catching on elsewhere, and when you look at how quickly all of those bands got big deals (and yes, Matador counts as a "big" deal), one starts to wonder how this New York/Brooklyn "scene" actually came about, and if it was really anything at all. The fact is that much of contemporary underground and/or "indie" music is supported by a profitable infrastructure that didn't exist during the No Wave days, and didn't even exist during the beginning of the Seattle grunge thing. Today, the kind of edgy, "arty" urban culture that the early 00's New York bands represented is something that can be mass marketed extremely quickly, and major corporations have discovered that it is quite profitable too. Again, this isn't to say that these developments are entirely bad. After all, I'm sure most musicians and artists welcome the increased opportunities to make money doing what they do, and its nice that you don't have to live in places like New York to quickly discover new music and art. All of these developments have been brought on by a myriad of other factors (with technology as the primary catalyst), but the current incarnation of "indie cool" has been influenced by these bands and the marketing that has driven them on to magazine covers. It seems like a natural progression from the awkward beginnings that corporate media encountered when they tried to market the Melvins, Jesus Lizard and Pavement, failing miserably in the process. They've clearly figured out how to do it now, however, and the interaction between mainstream corporate media culture and the underground is as lively as ever, and probably here to stay. In fact, the lines have become so completely blurred that no one seems to know the difference between an indie and a major, a marketing gimmick and true artistic movements. Maybe its the world as Andy Warhol always saw it, and there is no difference between any of those things when you get down to it. Or maybe corporate media has taken the life out of art and independent music, and Andy Warhol was just a dick.

Despite what seemed to be an attempt to make the Yeah Yeah Yeah and Liars look silly, the film does an equally good job making people like Lydia Lunch seem pretty ridiculous too (not to mention ARE Weapons, who seem sofa king we todd it throughout the film that it has to be a joke), because the two time periods are so different that it is impossible to compare them or make many important value judgments as many of the film's no wave interview subjects attempt to do when asked about bands like The Strokes. DNA made music in a crime infested Lower East Side with no expectation to ever even get noticed by the Village Voice. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs made music in a gentrified Lower East Side knowing that their music could very well be picked up and marketed by a record company that could generate enough money to make them rich and famous. I'm not sure if things in New York in the late 70's would have been quite the same if the environment had been similar to the one that Karen O encountered. And that is something that we'll never know.

Either way, that time has come, and by many indications, its going to be gone in the not too distant future. Meanwhile, American pop music seems to be in a period of limbo, with many wondering what the next movement will be, where it will come from, and how it might compare to the movements of the past, or influence the movements of the future. The good news is that the possibilities are endless, and there is a chance that the American underground might one day do it right. Who Knows? Apparently, no one does.