Kill Your Idols | GOING UNDERGROUND Idols sheds some light on the unsung early '80s downtown N.Y. noise-rock scene
Image credit: Kill Your Idols: Lisa Genet
GOING UNDERGROUND Idols sheds some light on the unsung early '80s downtown N.Y. noise-rock scene
Movie Review

Kill Your Idols (2006)

EW's GRADE
C

Details Limited Release: Jul 07, 2006; Rated: Unrated; Length: 71 Minutes; Genre: Documentary; Distributor: Palm Pictures

If American punk blew up the edifice of mainstream rock, the New York No Wave scene of the late '70s and early '80s made the CBGB revolution sound like FM lite. Supreme noisemakers such as Sonic Youth and Arto Lindsay forged a brave new cacophony, and this documentary captures, in black-and-white video, how they emerged from the starving bohemia of Manhattan's lower depths — at least, it does for about half an hour. Kill Your Idols then takes a misguided swerve into the current downtown New York rock scene, so that it can spend more time preaching about the anarchy of the good old days than it does revealing them.

Originally posted Jul 12, 2006 Published in issue #887 Jul 21, 2006 Order article reprints

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