Milli Vanilli

PART 1: THE STORY

In the summer of 1990, the American music industry performed a bizarre ritual. At a press conference, it was announced that the winners of that
year's 'Best New Artist' award, Milli Vanilli, had had their prize revoked for misrepresenting their contributions to their own music; it had been
discovered (though there was never much of a secret about it) that the group's putative members, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, had not performed
any of the vocals on their album. (The vocals were actually performed by Charles Shaw, John Davis, and Brad Howe.) Vanilli quickly became a running
joke in mass culture. Rob and Fab appeared in a self-mocking chewing-gum commercial, lip-synching the Care-Free jingle. A class-action suit was filed,
and eventually purchasers of Girl You Know It's True were given the opportunity to mail off for a rebate for fraud damages. And in 1991, Rob Pilatus
attempted suicide by jumping out of his Beverly Hill Hotel suite. Milli Vanilli today are little more than a fading joke and a trivia question
. Although they'd sold ten million albums and scored five Top Five singles (including three Number Ones), their hit songs have been erased from the
oldies playlists of radio stations across the nation.

But if Milli Vanilli's songs have been expunged from the collective memory, their disgrace remains a critical episode in the narrative contemporary popular
music tells to explain itself. That 1990 press conference came in the midst of crisis in the shared assumptions about authenticity in popular music. A New
Jersey congressman was proposing a law banning unannounced lip-synching at concerts. The cross-over of hip-hop represented by Milli-Vanilli's pop-rap
fusion was introducing Top 40 audiences to remixing and sampling strategies that called into question assumptions about songs's originality. Synthesizers,
originally exploited for their plastic, unnatural sound in the early 80s, had become the sonic norm, as familiar as amplified guitar strings. And sophisticated
recording techniques had emerged which could filter and modify any voice into a radio-ready instrument.

Pop music-making in the 1990s has more to do with filmmaking than jamming in a garage: every song is a collection of tracks laid down by assorted musicians,
edited together by producers, and fronted by charismatic performers. But while most viewers recognize the complex division of labor in moviemaking--nobody
gets upset that actors don't do their own stunts--pop music hangs on to the folk-era image of the individual artist communicating directly to her or his listeners.
Milli Vanilli became martyrs to this myth of authenticity. They were the recording industry's sacrifice meant to prove the integrity of the rest of their product--as if
the music marketed under the names U2 or Janet Jackson WEREN'T every bit as constructed and mediated, just because the voices on the records matched
the faces in the videos.

The sacrifice worked. Paula Abdul faced down a lawsuit from a former backup singer claiming Abdul's voice was barely audible on several of the tracks from
her hit Forever Your Girl, and established her artistic credibility by singing ballads on the follow-up Spellbound. Rapper Biz Markie was successfully sued for
unliscensed sampling, and now every hip-hop appropriation is contractually accounted for. Gangsta rap and grunge rock emerged as mass genres which laid
special claims to authentic expression, and nobody smirked. Sure, the rules had changed somewhat: the hard-rockin' earnestness of Bruce Springsteen's
comeback records in 1991 sounded painfully out of touch; in place of those plodding electric guitars, aging rockers discovered that they could shed the
burden of their years and regain intimacy with their audiences by going acoustic - or at least 'Unplugged', which quickly developed to mean anything except
electric guitars. Soon, post-Vanilli diva Mariah Carey was performing live on MTV just to prove her
multi-octave range was an honest freak of nature, and not just a studio trick.

In explaining the pleasures of mass culture, the aesthetic criteria that go along with the rubric of 'authenticity'--designations like 'talent' and 'quality'--are
pretty useless standards of judgement--after-the-fact rationalizations, often, for more inexplicable attractions. Why do I love Milli Vanilli's Girl, You Know It's
True? I can go on all day long about its neo-soul songcraft, its soaring synth-strings, its hip hop beat and clever samples. But do I think it's great because the people
involved were 'talented'? Who the hell cares? It's not like I'm inviting them to dinner. Plenty of the greatest music ever made has been created by hacks,
slackers, and no-names, who for whatever reasons stumbled into a little bit of genius. I should point out that just because Rob and Fab didn't have much to
do with the creation of Milli Vanilli's music, it's not like nobody else did. The genius behind the Milli Vanilli sound, if you want to know, is producer Frank Farian,
also responsible for disco pioneers Boney M. There was probably some specific mastermind behind the image and marketing of Milli Vanilli, as well,
whose name is lost to history because of the biases of what gets to count as 'art' and what as 'packaging'.
In any case, dividing up the responsibility for the bundle of sound and images known as Milli Vanilli may be a significant
historical task, but it does little to make sense of the pleasures of the text. We can explain Farian's contribution to the bundle of sound and image known as 'Milli
Vanilli' in terms of valorized technical skills. But how much credit should we give Rob and Fab for their wonderful, slightly off-base charisma? For their enormous
pecs? For their great hair? These may be 'superficial' attributes, but they have AS much to do with aesthetic effect as rhythm tracks. To classify some qualities
as 'talents' and others as 'superficial' may work for judging friends, but they have nothing to do with the play of images that makes up the art of mass culture.

None of this is to say that this art need be seen as in any way 'compromised' by its commodity status.

The disgracing of Milli Vanilli didn't return popular music to a golden age of direct communication between artist and fan. I'm not sure I'd want such a relationship,
if it ever existed-- most rock stars become a lot less interesting when you learn what they're 'really' like. But in demarcating the '90s' boundary line between 'art'
and 'image', what THIS DISGRACING may have inadvertently helped usher in is the era of the Supermodel. Cindy, Naomi, Linda and their cohort can't be
unmasked as talentless frauds, don't need to sing, dance, or act to be stars. They've given up any claim to creating anything other than images of themselves.
Does this mean they produce nothing that can be of any value to their millions of fans?

Those who embraced the harsh 'trial by media' sentencing imposed on the fronters of Milli Vanilli have in effect, conceded that they bought into the music for the
image and should be ashamed of themselves for confirmation of the fact that the public buy into a concept/image created by the record company, rather than
the music.

PART 2: THE MUSIC

Tracks to look out for (for those who are unpersuaded by populist view and like hip hop/ soul with a twist of turntablism and house sensibilites):

Girl You Know Its True (NY Subway Remix)
The extended version of Milli Vanillis first European hit was a clubbers delight and scratched and dropped in samples from Bobby Brown and Eric B & Rakim,
amongst others. This hard-to-find track is similar to an ULTIMIX remix - whereby the original is re-edited and fused with additional beats and samples to
create a sound collage of tough hip hop beats and shimmering percussive rhythms.

Baby Dont Forget My Number (NY Subway Remix)
This club mix starts with an elongated Public Enemy 'Fight The Power' sample -with PE rapper 'Flavour Flav' being sampled screaming 'Dont Believe The
Hype!" From herein, the track samples the Jungle Brothers (Ill House You) and many others to again, create an integration of club sounds, beats and
samples.

All or Nothing (12" Club Mix)
The 'Paid In Full' beat sampled from Eric B and Rakim and appearing on many Milli Vanilli singles doesnt make an appearance untill 8 minutes into this
classic club hit. The single was released at the same time as producer Frank Farian 'coming out' about MVs lip synching and therefor suffered from a
poorly constructed video borrowing heavily from MVs previous clips. The track however, was another club hip hop stomper mixing in concepts from the
above two tracks.