Okay, no one's been listening to parody lounge music. But I did listen to it like 20 years ago, when I first discovered Cheese, who is actually a man named Mark Jonathan Davis. His accompanying band, which he does not always play with, has cheese-related names as well -- Bobby Ricotta, Frank Feta and Billy Bleu. But it seems like the whole thing is designed to make us think of a variation on the lead singer's name -- Dick Cheese. Sophomoric, but amusing enough.
In 2000 -- though I think I discovered it three or four years later -- Cheese and company released an album called Lounge Against the Machine, which was comprised of lounge covers of alternative music from that time. I just checked iTunes, and the 11 tracks I have may have been acquired through a music sharing service or something because they contain some of the tracks from Lounge but then some others that are not on there. Anyway, the ones I remember most from my collection are "Suck My Kiss," "Smack My Bitch Up" and "More Human than Human," though the one that gets played the most in the general world is his cover of Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness."
If you can imagine a cheesy (pun intended) lounge singer singing "Change my pitch up, smack my bitch up" in a swing style, with an imaginary martini in his hand (though he usually requires both hands for his piano), you get what Cheese is all about. It's amusing to be sure, but you aren't going to listen to him round the clock or anything. It's not that kind of thing. It's Weird Al adjacent.
"Down With the Sickness" was what appeared in Zack Snyder's 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. I'd been turned on to Cheese just a year or two before that, so this was not where I discovered the musician. However, I feel like it was one of the most recent times I'd actually been reminded of him. Which is not all that recent.
Until the past month, when his work has now appeared in two different new movies.
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar was actually released in February, but I didn't watch it until the last day of April. Here, Cheese appears as a lounge singer in the titular resort that Barb and Star visit, though he's not singing White Zombie covers. The song from this movie that may have crept out into the zeitgeist a bit is called "I Love Boobies," and it's perfectly in keeping with Cheese's puerile sensibilities. One appearance in the film might have served him best, but they go back to him three or four times, with diminishing returns.
Then last night it was Snyder again with Army of the Dead, as both Cheese and Snyder come full circle to the origins of our general awareness of them. Dawn of the Dead, another zombie movie, was the film that introduced most of us to Snyder, before he became a particular type of director with films like 300, Watchmen and all his work for DC. He returns to that realm and brings Cheese with him, as the classic Snyder opening montage -- which was so great in Watchmen -- is accompanied here by Cheese's music. I suppose a White Zombie cover would have been thematically appropriate, but instead it's Cheese's take on "Viva Las Vegas," as the movie is about Vegas getting overrun by zombies and walled off from the rest of the world to contain the infection.
Snyder is obviously Cheese's biggest fan, as he also used Cheese in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the internet now tells me. I must not have noticed or it must not have made an impression on me, because it really had felt like the middle of the aughts since I'd last thought of Cheese.
Who knows if this is the beginning of a Cheese-assaince, or just a director returning to the same well for the third time and one random one-off appearance. But I'm sure Cheese is pretty psyched about it, because if I, one of his "biggest fans," had not had occasion to think about him in 15 years, I doubt many others had either.
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