I kind of miss my AP Lit class from way back in highschool, so I did a literary critique of this song to bring back memories.
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In his hit masterpiece “Re: Your Brains,” Jonathan Coulton makes a humorous, albeit vehement, attack on the corporate lifestyle. While juxtaposing office workers with zombies, he uses a tightly-woven series of literary and musical elements to further his critique.
E-mail is the dominant form of interoffice communication. Although phone calls are also commonly used, e-mails allow for non real-time communication to occur between multiple parties. The song’s title, “Re: Your Brains,” is a reference to e-mail subject lines. Taken literally, this would refer to the mythological idea of zombies needing to consume human brains for sustenance. In the corporate world, however, it refers to the idea of being paid for your time as opposed to what you produce. Your boss is literally renting your mind from you. Often, when a worker returns home from a shift, he may be too mentally fatigued to engage in any worthwhile activities. In a sense, his mind has been consumed–or “eaten.” Like his coworkers, who are “zombies now,” he too has become a zombie. The tone is furthered by other language commonly used in the corporate environment, such as FYI, colleagues, call, compromise, “wrap it up,” and so forth. Much of the negotiatory language is borrowed from typical managerial conflict resolution strategies.
Irony established throughout the song contributes to its humorous tone. In the refrain, the narrator states “all we want to do is eat your brains \ we’re not unreasonable, I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes.” Obviously if one’s brains are literally eaten, their eyes are useless. In a corporate sense, someone might argue that you’re not really a slave because you aren’t literally chained to your desk. This point is similarly moot. You are forced to be in an office unless you wish to starve, just like Tom from the song is “[spending his] whole life locked inside a mall.” The narrator makes it sound like the horrible effects of office culture aren’t so bad, when in fact they are fatal. Even the song’s melody contributes to this, using happier sounding notes when the narrator sings “eat your brains” at the end of the refrain.
