Milli Vanilli went down in history as one of the biggest pop scandals of all time. We know how it went. Two handsome black Europeans, Fab and Rob, make a splash in the 80s dance-pop scene with the catchphrase Girl You Know It’s True, hit three number ones in the United States, win a Grammy as best emerging artist. They had the flashiest hairdos and the tightest pants of all. They were number one. It will later be discovered that the two limited themselves to miming the pieces in playback and that they had never sung a single note of their hits. End of story: Fab and Rob get banned from radio, get their Grammys revoked, become the saddest joke around.
Milli Vanilli, the documentary signed by director Luke Korem and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival (in the fall on Paramount +) tells the story from another point of view. It focuses on the human side of the matter and the star-making mechanism. Thus, it turns out that there is much more to this story than one might think.
Rob Pilatus never recovered from the humiliation and died in 1998 after years spent in the terrible grip of drug addiction. Fabrice Morvan is alive and determined to tell the truth about him. “There is a French proverb,” he says to Rolling Stone. “Truth takes the stairs, lies take the elevator.”
Fab and Rob are the scapegoats in the process of demonizing the Milli Vanilli. Everyone was outraged with them and not with their producer, managers or record company. “Like when in mob movies, the feds have a bulletin board on the wall full of photos?” Morvan says. «It starts from the top: “This is the boss, this is a big shot, this one instead is one who follows orders”. Here, however, the journalists have always held us two responsible. No one wanted to annoy the big shots.’
Fab, born in Paris, and Rob, who was German, were outsiders in many ways. They met at a party in Munich. “And there weren’t many black people in Munich,” says Fab in the documentary. “We were the only ones with dark skin.” They had both had turbulent childhoods and were trying to make a life for themselves. They moved in together, dreaming of becoming famous. “He was like a big brother to me,” says Morvan. “I didn’t speak German well and he protected me, in many ways.”
It was the German producer Frank Farian, known for working with Boney M, the crazed discos of the 70s famous everywhere except in the United States, who offered them a contract. The two were young, hungry, willing to sign anything. Fabrice tells us that «we haven’t even read the contract». They were down when Farian stopped them from singing on their 1988 debut single, Girl You Know It’s True. When Farian released their debut album in Europe, their beautiful faces were on the cover, but their names weren’t even mentioned in the credits.
At the time no one, absolutely no one, thought Rob and Fab were singing. And nobody cared: we bought their records because they were full of funky pop-funk (you can have my tape of Blame it on the rain only snatching it from my cold corpse hands). Pilatus was unable to keep silent in the interviews and expressing himself in halting English, he made it clear that his voice bore no resemblance to the baritone one with an American accent that was heard in his songs. “Everyone asks me if I sing on this record, even my mother asks me,” said Pilatus at the time. «I am very proud and this thing embarrasses me… I have to go through it all the time, until I get stomach cancer and die».
When they performed at the Grammys they blatantly lip-sync. And at the screening of the documentary in Tribeca, one of the images that amused the audience the most was the close-up of Ozzy Osbourne, in a tuxedo, who watches their performance with a grimace of embarrassment on his face. Ozzy has seen some strange things in his life, but even he, in front of that show, seems to ask himself: “What is this?”.
It will forever remain a mystery why Farian chose to so blatantly expose his scam. It would have been normal to have a margin for a possible denial, he could have sent the boys to do some impromptu recording sessions, but without using the tapes, not telling them the truth and letting them delude themselves that they were in the mix. It would cost him nothing. And instead he slammed the truth in the face of the two, perhaps to intimidate them. It was a rookie mistake that ultimately cost him a ton of money (you may have noticed that no pop mogul has made the same faux pas since).
“We married that lie,” Morvan says in the documentary. And in the end success went to their heads. When they won the Grammy, Paul McCartney tried to congratulate them, but Pilatus told him, “Later.” His star fads were out of control. “Musically we are more talented than any Bob Dylan,” said Rob a Time. «Musically we are more talented than Paul McCartney. The lines sung by Mick Jagger are not clear, he doesn’t know how to modulate the sound. I am the new modern rock’n’roll. I’m the new Elvis.”
The media couldn’t wait for the two to capitulate and the film shows it clearly. The backlash was fierce, it was the roar of the boomers who wanted to take back control of the establishment. There was also a sense of racism and homophobia in that wave of indignation (Fab and Rob weren’t gay, but they were 1980s European hotties, so Americans automatically assumed they were). In a scene that grossed out Tribeca audiences, Howard Stern parodies them in blackface.
The documentary contains incredible footage from the first press conference after the scandal broke, in a room full of angry journalists who continue to blather about integrity. One of them asks, “How do we know you’re not lying?” As if it were plausible that they had made it all up. Rob and Fab close the press conference singing Girl You Know It’s True live, and they do it well too. But nobody listens to them.
The two had to return the Grammy. “Do you know what happened to the statuette?” Morvan asked me. “It’s in the Grammy Museum. They broke it and placed it on a shelf. Someone sent me a photo. I thought, ‘Oh my God, have they gone this far?’
The entire music industry was shocked at the idea of playback, but the question that recurs throughout the documentary is: what did Clive Davis know and when did he know it? The president of Arista has always said that he and his label were in the dark. Some interviewees seem to suggest otherwise. The director says that «in making the film I found interesting the total absence of remorse and the lack of any will to finally say how things were thirty years later. No one can admit that “Rob and Fab shouldn’t have been the ones to put all the blame.” Nobody says: “It was our project, the Milli Vanilli weren’t just Rob and Fab, in fact, it wasn’t even their idea”».
And certainly the two weren’t the only pretty faces in pop lip-syncing. At the time there was a constant rumor that the stars had their vocals “sweetened”. But there was something more about Rob and Fab: their quirkiness, their foreignness, their androgyny, their accent, their personality that made them an easy target. This is why, over the years, Milli Vanilli have become a negative legend, while C+C Music Factory have simply been forgotten.
When they returned as Rob & Fab, with an album of their very own, the game was over. Farian then released a record credited to The Real Milli Vanilli titled The Moment of Truth. Pilatus tragically entered the list of drug victims: he went to rehab several times for addiction to crack and finally died in a hotel room after ingesting a mix of alcohol and pills. Morvan moved to Amsterdam, rebuilt his life, tried to prove that he is a true artist. He started a family and started over as a songwriter.
The film closes poignantly: Fab performs outdoors and sings Blame it on the rain in front of an audience that incites and supports him. Thus the documentary becomes a surprisingly moving tribute to his resilience. As Morvan says now, “being underestimated is the best thing. Even today people think I can’t pick a single note, but then they hear me sing. Music has helped me heal. That’s why music and I will never, ever part.”
From Rolling Stone US.
