Richard Cheese (born November 27, 1965 in New York), real name Mark Jonathan Davis, is an American musician.
He sings seemingly straight Cover Versions of Rock & Roll and Hip-Hop songs in the style of a Lounge Lizard, backed by his band Lounge Against the Machine.
He's become increasingly notable in the 2010s and 2020s for his appearances in The LEGO Batman Movie, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, and for the use of reprises of his in the films of Zack Snyder.
Discography:
- Lounge Against the Machine (2000)
- Tuxicity (2002)
- I'd Like a Virgin (2004)
- Aperitif for Destruction (2005)
- The Sunny Side of the Moon: The Best of Richard Cheese (2006)
- Silent Nightclub (2006)
- Dick at Nite (2007)
- Viva la Vodka (2009)
- OK Bartender (2010)
- Lavapalooza (2010) (As Johnny Aloha)
- A Lounge Supreme (2011)
- Richard Cheese Live at the Royal Wedding (2011)
- Back in Black Tie (2012)
- Bakin' At The Boulder (2015)
- Supermassive Black Tux (2015)
- The Lounge Awakens (2015)
- Licensed to Spill (2017)
- Numbers of the Beast (2020)
Tropes associated with Richard Cheese include:
- Artist and the Band: "Richard Cheese & Lounge Against The Machine"
- Auto-Tune: Occasionally retained in covers of songs where the Auto-Tune is supposed to be gratuitous. He gets in an argument with his robot voice at the end of his "Stronger" cover.
- Audience Participation Song: "She told me to--" "CUM!" "Come. Yes. Thank you."
- Hilariously played with in one of the live recordings of "Me So Horny". He asks the audience to sing along with the chorus, which they do. For one line.
"Keep doin' it!" - Berserk Button:
- Bobby is very protective of his piano if "Viva La Vida" is anything to go on.
- Richard himself hates being corrected, as witness his abortive cover
of Bell Biv DeVoe's "Do Me".
- Built with LEGO: The LEGO Batman Movie has a Minifigure version of the group singing "Man in the Mirror". The soundtrack also features their version of "Everything Is Awesome".
- Call-and-Response Song: "Chop Suey". "Why did you leave the keys upon the table?" "You wanted to!" "Oh."
- Casanova Wannabe: His stage persona in live concerts. If you're a female, expect to be hit on (for laughs), groped, or asked for what song he should play next.
- Careful with That Axe: In the cover of "Been Caught Stealing", Richard is attacked by a dog, which is conveyed with a mix of barks, growls, and Richard screaming for help.
- In a lighter note, the drummer in "You're the Inspiration" tries to foley out an intro to the song.
- "Viva la Vida" ends with Dick's screams of pain as he gets his ass kicked by Bobby.
- Cluster F-Bomb: He has no qualms about picking profanity-heavy tunes. Some of the more profane (and raunchy) ones are even compiled in Down with the Dickness.
- Comically Missing the Point: Of Green Day's "American Idiot", see Medley below.
- Cover Album: Technically all of them. But Dick at Nite aims for television opening themes instead of regular songs.
- The Cover Changes the Gender: Averted, always, even when the song is "Don't Cha". Becomes especially bizarre when he covers "My Neck, My Back", where he sings about his vagina, and parodied on Lords of Acid's "Pussy", where he's talking about Siegfried and Roy's tiger.
- The Cover Changes the Meaning: His cover of "Down with the Sickness" tweaks the lyrics slightly to make the song about an actual sickness, rather than a metaphor for societal oppression.
- "Just Dance" inverts it somewhat, where the song's upbeat tune is made into a sombre jazz song, on top of Richard laying out what was Lyrical Dissonance into the obvious. "Now she's drunk, lost, no communication, can't get home because she can't find her keys, and now she can't see, ladies and gentlemen."
- A less straight (tee-hee) example is "Relax", which slows down the pace quite a bit to go from hard and fast fucking to slow lovemaking. Until he finally says "come".
- Digital Piracy Is Evil: Due to the fact that most of the royalties of his music go to the original artists, he obviously does not take kindly to fans pirating his music. His threats of legal actions toward pirates only got worse when he was unable to afford corrective surgery on his eyes due to lack of funds. Often, during shows, he'll lightly admonish people recording via film (you can hear a track where he gropes a woman recording).
- Edible Theme Naming: Richard Cheese, Bobby Ricotta, Frank Feta, Billy Bleu...
- Epic Fail: He spends the entirety of the "Viva La Vida" cover trying to figure out the piano notes for several painful minutes, messing up things he gets right the first time, and then getting beaten by Bobby for touching his piano.
- "Galileo Galileo Galileo Galileo Galileo Galileo Galileo Galileo—I'm sorry, what's the next line?"
- "Light My Fire" ends with Lt. Sulu accidentally firing ("FIRE!") and destroying the USS Enterprise.
- Gratuitous Spanish: Richard getting into the spirit of "Sunday Bloody Sunday":Uno, does, tres, catorce! Hola, senoritas why senores! Me llamo Ricardo Queso, let's mambo!
- Greatest Hits Album: Sunny Side of the Moon.
- HA HA HA—No: A variant occurs with a fake telephone call between "Weird Al" Yankovic and Richard: Weird Al returns Richard's call about joining forces to do Richard's latest album. Weird's response: NOPE! (hangs up telephone)
- I Am Not Shazam: Richard calls Weird Al "Weird". "Actually, it's Al."
- I Am the Band: Richard Cheese is the only constant: his fellow band members have all changed hands at least once, especially Bobby.
- In the Style of: Occasionally mixes up the Lounge covers: for example, "Enter Sandman" by Metallica is done in the style of the Chordettes' version of "Mr. Sandman", Garbage's "Only Happy When It Rains" evokes Singin' in the Rain, and his live version of "Don't Cha" has him parody ABBA, George Takei, Bob Dylan, The Doobie Brothers... at times he breaks out imitations such as Björk during a performance.
- Off of Lavapalooza, the rendition of Sisqo's Thong Song is done in the same exact manner as The Enchanted Tiki Room.
- Indecipherable Lyrics: Undone by many of his covers, in which you can understand him perfectly. He keeps it in tact for Lil Wayne's "Lollipop", though, by mumbling all the words. The downright unintelligible "Yellow Ledbetter" has Richard making up some Word Salad Lyrics. Similarly, Rihanna's "Work" turns into gibberish, in-between Richard mocking the song.
- Let's Duet: Did "Viva Las Vegas" in duet with Allison Crowe for the prologue of Army of the Dead.
- Lounge Lizard: Complete with Tacky Tuxedo.
- Lyrical Dissonance: Must we say? Things like "Enter Sandman" and "Man in the Box" become 50s-style Chordettes pop and smooth tango music, respectively. Sometimes actually inverted: for example, "Beat It" becomes somewhat more somber, as does "Just Dance", both of which have pretty dark subject matter. He also has slow, dark, sentimental songs... about looking for "a bad bitch" or how he wants to bend you over his Lamborghini. There are exceptions, such as "Perfect Situation", which is oddly even darker than the original song.
- May the Farce Be with You: The Lounge Awakens is supposedly a live album recorded on Tattooine. Along with actual Star Wars songs and Mark's old song "Star Wars Cantina", there is Weird Al's "Yoda", space-themed songs ("Space Age Love Song", "Intergalactic") and jokey choices ("Rebel Yell" for the Alliance, "Ben" for Kenobi, "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" for the Death Star...).
- Medley: His "American Idiot" cover devolves into one of these, going through "My Country, 'Tis of Thee", "God Bless America", "America the Beautiful", "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "La Cucaracha" before cycling back around to the Green Day song. The live version of "Brass Monkey" earns some other brief Beastie Boys snippets.
- Musical Pastiche: While being a lounge-comedy act in general, specific songs are parodies or crossovers of others. Metallica's "Enter Sandman" is covered in the style of The Chordettes' "Mister Sandman".
- National Stereotypes: Johnny Aloha's entire band consists of increasingly bizarre ones.
- Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: With a fake duet with Lieutenant Sulu (who is not the Sulu... and he's not George Takei, either - Richard Cheese is a Takei impersonator), Richard Cheese's lawyer personally calls him up to see if he did the disclaimer and made sure he said "Celebrity Voices Impersonated"."By the way, this call cost you fifty dollars."
- Parody Assistance: Fred Schneider joined the band on stage for a version of The B-52s' "Love Shack".
- Pun: During the Imperial March cover: "Piano solo! Bass solo! Drum solo! HAN SOLO!"
- "The horn section so horny!"
- Punny Name: His band members.
- Pun-Based Title: Lounge Against the Machine, and all album titles (i.e. Dick at Nite is to Nick at Nite following the television theme).
- Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: In his version of "Chop Suey!":"WHY! DID YOU LEAVE THE KEYS? UPON THE TABLE?!"
- Running Gag: The word American in the line "knocking me out with those American thighs" changes every time he sings "You Shook Me All Night Long".
- At concerts, "my good friend [name of singer/band]".
- Also at concerts, getting the latest lyrics of the newest, most popular song (Lil' Wayne's Lollipop, Gangnam Style, Despacito) off the internet, and proceeding to butcher it deadpan by doing a straight reading of the lyrics.
- Scenery Gorn: Richard Cheese Live At Wayne Financial Tower In Metropolis.
- Something Something Leonard Bernstein: "Despacito" is just Richard singing "Spanish Spanish Spanish" to the melody of the second chorus before a Title Drop.
- Stage Name: Richard Cheese is really Mark Jonathan Davis (not to be mistaken for the guy from Korn), meaning he invoked all those YouTube comments pointing out his name is Dick Cheese. The Lounge members are also given rather cheese-based silly names—Bobby Ricotta (Noel Melanio), Frank Feta (Brian Fishler), and Billy Bleu (unknown).
- The Scapegoat: Britney Spears in his live version of "Toxic", as Richard launches into a monologue blaming her for every scandal, then-recent (such as breaking the toilet on the ISS and attempting to kill some astronaut's girlfriend), even up to and including sending our troops into Iraq "with no justification whatsoever!"
- Self-Titled Album: Inverted; Cheese used synthetic instruments for his first album, and then named his actual band after said album when he got one for the second.
- Small Name, Big Ego: All a part of his stage persona. When the news broke that Glee had ripped off Jonathan Coulton's cover of "Baby Got Back", his immediate reaction on Facebook was to speculate that his would be next.ATTENTION GLEE: I know you are already thinking about copying one of my swingin' swanky arrangements and using it on your show. I don't blame you, I'm awesome.
- Something Something Leonard Bernstein: Aside from a few listed on Take That!, his cover of "Despacito" consisted of "Spanish Spanish Spanish Spanish... Despacito!"
- Sophisticated as Hell: His charming, smooth demeanor contrasts with the songs he covers.
- Song Parody: Inverted. The lyrics are kept largely the same, but the tunes are radically changed. The only straight-forward example is "Star Wars Cantina", which is "Copacabana" with the lyrics rewritten to be a plot summary of the Star Wars original trilogy.
- "Yellow" may also qualify—the lyrics are the same, but they're applied to the theme from Brazil, which does have its own lyrics.
- Special Guest: Most times faked - a text-to-speech voice plays Stephen Hawking in "The Girl Is Mine", the Sulu in "Light My Fire" is Mark himself... but "Weird Al" Yankovic and Corey Taylor have sung with him.
- Take That!:
- In the live version of "Lollipop", Richard Cheese claims to have gotten the latest lyrics of his good friend, Lil' Wayne. They're all gibberish, except for "Shorty wanna", "lollipop", and "pussy".
"Shorty wanna suck dat ungh ahhhhh hurr ghanbaba murhmahumr ammaurhghaa nanghahrug ammangh mdunganur pussy"- In his Christmas album, the band begins to play "Last Christmas", but Richard stops them all.
"Uhm, we were going to do a swingin' lounge version of 'Last Christmas', by Wham!... but that song sucks! Next tune!"- Off Viva la Vodka, which mostly features songs from a Washington, D.C. performance:
"So I visited the White House the other day, which, aside from George W. Bush being there, was pretty cool!"- "Freebird" is one to people who... you guessed it... keep telling him to play Freebird, which is a Take That! in itself.
"Now shut the [bleep] up, you stupid drunken [bleep]heads!"- His attempt to sing Rihanna's "Work" is mumbled and has Dick outright asking why this song is considered a hit.
- This Song Goes Out to TV Tropes: "Rape Me" is "for the ladies", "Don't Cha" "goes out to all the lesbians in the audience", real or imagined. He has one for "[his] good friend, the Beastie Boys" in his cover of "Brass Monkey".
- Stealth Pun: The singer's name is one for "dick cheese".
- Viva Las Vegas!: The band's actually based out of Los Angeles, but Las Vegas is a common theme and destination spot for them. There's a reason why "Christmas in Las Vegas" was their first original song, and why Zack Snyder chose him to perform the eponymous song in Army of the Dead along with Allison Crowe (outside of their usual collaboration).
