RE: Your Brains
Zombie Thursdays is a weekly feature with guest blogger, Miranda. You can read more about her here.
This week on Zombie Thursday I bring you another musical selection! I’ve been anxious to share this one in particular because I find it absolutely hilarious, and hope that you will too. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you have already heard this song or others by the very cool and talented Jonathan Coulton!
Mr. Coulton is a singer/songwriter who in 2005 left his day job as a software programmer to pursue music full time. What initially came from this endeavor was a project called “Thing a Week.” He literally wrote and released a new song every single week for a year! That’s fifty-two songs in one year. Very impressive considering some bands can’t even release an album of ten songs in over five years.
Now, his songs are not all about zombies and horror and death. Most are about geeky, nerdy things as he is a self-proclaimed geek (referring to, of course, someone who is into video games, computers, and comic books, not to someone who bites the heads off of live animals and drinks their blood in a freak show act. But that would be pretty sweet too). One that you may recognize - and a song that gained him a lot of attention during his ‘Thing a Week’ period - is the song “Code Monkey.” I believe I have heard it as the theme song to an Adult Swim cartoon.
Because of his background, it seems as if many of his songs contain “office” humor-- jokes about working in teams, email lingo, and other corporate nonsense your bosses make you say. The song I bring to you today is no exception.
“Re: Your Brains.” The name alone is hysterical, and the song is even better! If you haven’t heard it (and I’m secretly hoping you have because it is that awesome), the basic premise is an email from a guy who works in the office. He’s just catching up with his friend and everything is going well... except for the small fact that he’s recently been turned into a zombie! The song uses all kinds of fabulous email speak-- “FYI-- You’re all gonna die!” and talking about “maybe we can compromise?” and of course, “let’s table this for later.” I’ve never worked in an office or cubicle setting, but I do work for a large corporation. Even I appreciate the lameness of that kind of dialogue.
The whole song is amazing, but I think one of my favorite lines is, “I’m not a monster, Tom. Well... technically I am. I guess I am!” Probably not as funny written out, but when you get to it in the song, I sure hope it makes you laugh.
Another very cool thing about Jonathan Coulton’s music is that it is released under a “Creative Commons license,” which basically means anyone can take the music and make fan videos, parodies, art, anything! That being said, you will find many video versions of “Re: Your Brains” all over YouTube. Most are just the song with zombie images going through a slide show, but there’s another that stands out and is kind of cool. Someone took animation from a video game (or programmed it themselves? I’m not a programming expert, so I’m not really sure!) and put it to the music, complete with sexy zombie pinups dancing in the background.
However, the music video that I personally like the most comes from Dragon*ConTV. Every year D*C is held in
Enjoy!