Oxford Collapse - The Birthday Wars

What this video is

Released in the summer of 2008, 'The Birthday Wars' arrived at a moment when Brooklyn's indie underground was simultaneously peaking in cultural visibility and beginning to fracture into sub-genres. Oxford Collapse occupied a deliberately unfashionable niche — raw, economical post-punk indebted to SST Records, Mission of Burma, and Drive Like Jehu — at a time when the blogosphere was accelerating hype cycles and…

Why it matters

Represents the late-2000s strain of Brooklyn post-punk revivalism that consciously modeled itself on the SST/Minutemen ethic of prolific, low-overhead output. As the lead single from Bits, 'The Birthday Wars' functioned as a statement of purposeful aesthetic restraint within a Sub Pop catalog…