Australian alt-rock outfit Kingswood have served up a piece of pop delight on their new single “Messed It Up,” and found the perfect theme to correspond with it visually, looking to the rival gang ideal which has been depicted in film and music video for ages. The clip for the track features a group of opposing factions who need to settle the score and find themselves with only one recourse: Throwdown in a dojo — dance-off style.
“The concept and thinking behind the ‘Messed It Up’ video is inspired by an amalgamation of many loves and influences — the most prevalent of these being Michael Jackson and the Matrix,” Kingswood tells Vanyaland. “The ‘Beat It’ video clip poses the archetypal setting of two rival gangs, drawing from similarly from classics such as Romeo & Juliet, West Side Story, Grease etc., and framed in music and dance and something we thought would be quite cool to modernize and fuse with an aesthetic drawn from the martial art world which became popularized in the first Matrix movie. All of this coupled with our stylistic influences from modern pop culture and you get Kingswood’s ‘Messed It Up.'”
And while there’s no clear victor in the competition between the Sun Tigers and Moon Dragons on the video below, all of us who bear witness to the spectacle clearly win out.