Northern European Cheese House

One thing that’s fun about electronic music is the wide variety of sub-genres that people come up with to describe it. There’s tribal house, tech-house, disco house, microhouse, deep trance, progressive trance, UK garage, two-step, ambient techno, dark ambient, freestyle, neo-electro, big beat, broken beat, gabba, and many others. You get the idea. Some people only listen to one of these. I once met a cat at a party who told me he was a DJ. “Oh, yeah? What do you spin?” I asked. “Progressive trance,” came the reply. “And what else?” I countered. “Just progressive trance,” he said. “Hmmm. Sounds rather . . . limiting,” was my response.

There’s a sub-genre whose name I made up myself, but I think it defines a cohesive sound, and I’m pretty sure you’ve heard the music I’m referring to. That sub-genre is “Northern European Cheese House.” This style is marked by basic four-to-the floor house beats, with sing-along choruses and simple chords that can be played with one hand on a keyboard. It goes without saying that these songs are always in major keys. There is a large overlap between N.E.C.H. and what is commonly called “Eurodance” or “Eurobeat.” But what I’m referring to is a particular sound that is, by design, incredibly poppy, totally mainstream, terribly catchy, and really, well, cheesy. And for some reason Germans and Scandinavians seem to be the premier purveyors of this musical guilty pleasure.

The Crazy Frog cover of “We Are The Champions,” or any Crazy Frog song for that matter, is an excellent example. (You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCj-RyKCmHQ) I understand it was a massive hit across Europe last summer, but it’s not too well known on this side of the pond. The frog was originally created by a Swede named Daniel Malmedahl, and the production of the songs is done by the unimaginatively named German production duo Bass Bumpers.

Another N.E.C.H. classic (and by classic, I mean it’s from the nineties) is “Cotton Eye Joe” by Rednex. AllMusicGuide reviewer and friend-of-a-friend Johnny Loftus once referred to their album Sex and Violins as “inane, even for the cartoon land of Eurodance.” Precisely.

The most widely heard example would be the Vengaboys, particularly “We Like To Party.” Americans who live near a Six Flags theme park will recognize this as the song the creepy old guy in the mask dances to in the adverts. The Vengaboys went on to produce other N.E.C.H. hallmarks like “Boom Boom Boom Boom,” and “We’re Going To Ibiza.” Despite the name, the Vengaboys was mainly composed of two Dutch DJs/producers, Wessel van Diepen and Dennis van den Driesschen. While they are not German or Scandinavian, for my purposes we’ll count the Netherlands as Northern Europe. 2 Unlimited were pioneers of Northern European cheese house, and they were composed of two Belgian producers, a Dutch rapper and a Dutch singer. Remember “Twilight Zone” and “Get Ready For This?”

Oddly, one of the songs most representative of N.E.C.H. was not composed by Northern Europeans. That would be “The Hampsterdance.” It was one of the first examples of a popular internet meme, and it was created by a Canadian art student named Deirdre LaCarte. Heather Phares, another AllMusicGuide reviewer, writes that the Hampsterdance song has a “Chipmunks meets Rednex” vibe. If you’ve seen See Spot Run (and who hasn’t), you will remember this music from the scene where David Arquette gets locked out of his apartment. (As an aside, here’s some career advice for Mr. Arquette: everyone knows your career is not doing great if you’re making a movie with an animal, i.e., Chuck Norris in Top Dog, or a little kid, i.e., Burt Reynolds in Cop & A Half, but if someone hands you a script with an animal and a little kid, you should run in the opposite direction as quickly as possible.)