Jamie xx’s new video for his track, “Gosh,” is a rallying call to arms for clubbers. Directed by Romain Gavras, it’s a stylized extremist tale of an outsider in a dystopian future, complete with heroes, gangs, and martial arts, and introducing the mysteriously un-Googleable Hassan Kone.
Gavras uproots the Tour D’Eiffel to Tianducheng, a Chinese town built in 2001 to emulate the beauty and delicacy of Paris. Its green gardens are now overgrown with weeds, and a scale replica of the tower is left rusted and unfinished. The area in East China is now a ghost town, a perfect setting for the clip, which comments on class, revolution, and belonging.
The director’s work has always acknowledged a highly contrasting class divide, having previously made films for M.I.A.’s “Born Free,” Justice’s “Stress,” and Jay & Ye’s “No Church In the Wild.” True to form, “Gosh” is no different.
The film begins with our hero in a regal purple suite, surrounded by comrades entrenched in virtual reality. He swiftly exits and calls an army of young martial artists to arms, bringing to mind the aesthetic of the Shaolin Tagou fighting school featured in previous collaborator M.I.A.’s video with French artist Gener8ion. The promo is brain tangling, mind numbing, and grandiose, climaxing in a human i-Ching wheel around our hero, the drone shot ending leaves us with a cliffhanger.
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Text Tom Ivin