Kill Your Idols (film)

Kill Your Idols
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Scott Crary
Produced by	Dan Braun Josh Braun Scott Crary
Starring	Glenn Branca Michael Gira Eugene Hütz Arto Lindsay Lydia Lunch Thurston Moore Karen O Lee Ranaldo Martin Rev J.G. Thirlwell
Distributed by	Palm Pictures
Release date	July 7, 2006 (2006-July-07)
Running time	75 min.
Country	United States
Language	English

Kill Your Idols is a documentary film about three decades of art punk bands in New York City, directed and produced by Scott Crary and executive produced by Dan Braun and Josh Braun. The film debuted at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Documentary.

The documentary begins with a historical overview of the early art punk and no wave movements that originated in New York City in the 1970s. Through photos, archival performance footage and interviews with seminal bands like Suicide, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, and Theoretical Girls, the inspirations for and ideologies of those movements are discussed as well as their subsequent influence on early 1980s post-punk bands like Sonic Youth, Swans, and Foetus. The film then jumps forward to 2002 to introduce bands emerging at that time that either claimed some affinity with the early art punk and no wave movements or were depicted as such by the media. Pitchfork writer Brandon Stosuy cites 2002 as the year when "the post-No New York moment bubbled most briskly." Crary uses this revival as a pretense to discuss notions of artistic influence and cultural nostalgia. Regarding his intentions for the film's thematic premise, Crary stated:

Of course the irony of a movement like No Wave, which sought to consciously rebuke what came before, eventually leaving a concentrated legacy of its own appealed to me. And the film became more about defining that irony than any sort of attempt at a historical document or overview.