"We weren't just trying to make music," says Jim Sclavunos of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. "We were also trying to be monsters!"


Many listeners of New York's avant-garde, no-wave music of the '70s might be inclined to agree. Screeching, a-structural, and provocative, bands like D.N.A. and Swans were out not for fame, but to destroy conventional music altogether. Their moment was brief, but their influence persisted.

Twenty years later, a second generation of noise addicts came along in New York. Epitomized by bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Dice, and A.R.E. Weapons, they saw themselves as the no-wave scene's natural inheritors. But things had changed in the interim. New York wasn't the same, nor the record industry, nor the artists themselves.


Kill Your Idols suggests that what the first generation did for love, the second did for more mercenary reasons: money, fame, and glamour. Aging scenesters Lydia Lunch and Glenn Branca hold themselves in the highest esteem, and hate virtually everything that's come after. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, flush with success, don't seem to care. They're just making music, after all. They're not "trying to be monsters."