Music: The funniest Dick in showbusiness

Old-fashioned, at times annoying, and mostly uninspiring, we certainly never thought of lounge music as “funny” listening. That’s until we discovered Richard Cheese – the alter ego of 45 year-old LA-based singer/ comedian/actor Mark Jonathan Davis – whose cheesed-out covers of mainstream and alternative hits managed to turn the elevator music genre into a hilarious exercise.

Active since 2000, he’s now released 10 albums of irreverent swinging remakes with jazz trio Lounge Against The Machine (milking the dairy joke with members aliases like Bobby Ricotta, Frank Feta and Billy Bleu), spoofing cult classics with titles such as I’d Like a Virgin, Sunny Side of The Moon, OK Bartender, Tuxicity, or Aperitif For Destruction. With Cheese’s trademark crooner style and falsely naïve emphasis on explicit lyrics, bubblegum pop hits are suddenly exposed for all their vapid absurdity, angst-laden anthems (System of a Down’s Chop Suey, Slipknot’s People Equals Shit) take a humorous pathetic turn and the offensive (Nine Inch Nails’ Closer, Nirvana’s Rape Me) verges onto the profoundly disturbing. The result is riotous and nothing short of plain genius. Paying his very own “fromage homage” to the biggest names in music, Davis selects songs that “have that special… something, songs that will be around five, 10, 20 years from now.” By no means the sole perpetrators of the Vegas lounge-style cover genre, RC & LATM remain the loudest and edgiest, pushing the latent irony of current Top 40 hits to the farthest. Don’t miss the band’s only headlining concert in Europe this year, at London’s HMV Forum on 6th July.

Slipknot – People Equals Shit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBfEtnHE6MU

Closer – Nine Inch Nails