Milli Vanilli
Milli Vanilli was a contemporary R&B duo group from Munich, Germany, created in 1988 by the producer Frank Farian. The duo consisted of Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus.
Milli Vanilli's debut album was All or Nothing in Europe and Girl You Know It's True in the United States. They achieved international success and earned a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1990. They became one of the most popular acts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with seven million records sold in the United States alone and approximately 30 million singles internationally.
Milli Vanilli attracted controversy when Farian announced that Morvan and Pilatus did not sing their vocals and lip-synced for performances. Their vocals were instead provided by Brad Howell, John Davis, Charles Shaw, Jodie Rocco, and Linda Rocco. Their Grammy award was revoked. In 1998, they recorded the comeback album Back and in Attack, but its release was canceled when Pilatus died that year.
Beginnings, 1988–1989
, from Munich, met Fab Morvan, from Paris, in Los Angeles at a disco and reconnected again in Munich. They bonded over their experiences growing up in European cities; Pilatus said, "Maybe it's because we're both black people who grew up in foreign cities that don't have too many blacks." In Munich, they attempted to find work as backing singers, then formed their own act and recorded an album for a small German label that sold a few thousand records. According to Pilatus, they struggled financially and lived in a housing project.The German music producer Frank Farian, who had previously created the disco group Boney M., invited Pilatus and Morvan to his Frankfurt studio to listen to a demo, "Girl You Know It's True". They told him they could sing it. According to Pilatus, Farian said that he would make them multi-millionaires. On January 1, 1988, the two signed a contract with Farian to record 10 songs a year. The duo signed without understanding the terms and conditions. The duo's singing in the recording studio did not impress Farian. The final mix of "Girl You Know It's True" was finished by studio performers—including Charles Shaw, John Davis, Brad Howell, and twin sisters Jodie and Linda Rocco—in March and April.
Farian gave his new project the name "Milli Vanilli", with "Milli" taken from the nickname of his then-girlfriend Ingrid Segieth, and "Vanilli" added to sound like the British band Scritti Politti. By May, Pilatus and Morvan were touring Spain, France and Italy, lip-syncing to the pre-recorded tracks and thrilling crowds with their distinct style — spandex shorts, thigh-high boots and cornrow hair extensions. According to Pilatus, "We would ask Frank, 'When are we going to be allowed to give some input?'. And he would say, 'Yeah, yeah, but right now we need you to go out and do promotion. Of course, you'll get to do it, just work with us'. That's how he strung us along."
"Girl You Know It's True" peaked at No. 1 on the German Singles Chart and No. 3 on the UK Singles Chart. It was also a big success in the United States, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending 1 April 1989. After "Girl You Know It's True" took off in Germany in the summer of 1988, Farian produced and wrote most of the material on the album All or Nothing, which was released in Europe in November 1988. "After Frank released the album, he told us that it was too late to stop now", Pilatus said. "Because the single was such a big success, he said, 'Now you have to go through with it. I'll cover you guys. Nobody will find out'. He said, 'Here, I'll give you $20,000 advance money'. We never had a hit before, so we went along with it. We played with fire and now we know, but it's too late." By December 1988, Pilatus and Morvan had both realized that neither of their actual voices would ever be heard on any Milli Vanilli tracks.
All or Nothing was a moderate success, reaching the Top 40 in several European countries and No. 1 in New Zealand. It originally reached No. 37 in the UK Albums Chart but was packaged together with The U.S.-Remix Album: All or Nothing in 1989 under the name 2×2 and reached No. 6. All or Nothing was subsequently expanded and repackaged as Girl You Know It's True for audiences in the United States and released in March 1989. It was a major success, producing five singles, including the title track of the American version, that all entered the Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100. Three of these five singles, "Baby Don't Forget My Number", "Blame It on the Rain", and "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You", went to No. 1. In May 1989, the duo performed at the first World Music Awards in Monte Carlo, where "Girl You Know It's True" was awarded Song of the Year. In January 1990, the album Girl You Know It's True was certified 6× platinum by the RIAA after spending seven weeks atop the Billboard Top 200. It spent 41 weeks in the Top 10 of the Billboard Top 200 and 78 weeks on the charts overall. It was also certified Diamond in Canada, denoting sales of over a million units there. Milli Vanilli won the Best New Artist award at the 32nd Grammy Awards, as well as three awards at the 17th American Music Awards. However, the duo was not without their detractors, as Rolling Stone Magazine named them "worst act of 1989" and Girl You Know It's True "worst album of 1989".
Lip-syncing exposure and media backlash, 1989–1991
When the duo came in for their first interview with MTV, executive Beth McCarthy-Miller stated that the duo's English language skills stirred doubts among those present as to whether they had sung on their records. In July 1989, MTV launched a Club MTV tour featuring Was, Information Society, Paula Abdul, Tone Loc and Milli Vanilli, with Downtown Julie Brown and the Club MTV dancers.The first public sign that the group was lip-syncing came on July 21, 1989, during a live performance on MTV at the Lake Compounce theme park in Bristol, Connecticut. As they performed, a malfunctioning hard drive caused the recording of the song "Girl You Know It's True" to jam and skip, repeatedly playing the partial line "Girl, you know it's..." through the speakers. "I knew right then and there, it was the beginning of the end for Milli Vanilli", recalled Pilatus of the incident. "When my voice got stuck in the computer, and it just kept repeating and repeating, I panicked. I didn't know what to do. I just ran off the stage." Downtown Julie Brown ran after Pilatus and convinced him to finish the set. "With a bit of pushing and screaming, and a couple of F-words I think as well, I got them back out there", Brown explained on VH1's Behind the Music. Despite the mishap, the concert audience seemed neither to care, nor even to notice, and the concert continued as if nothing unusual had happened.
In a March 1990 issue of Time magazine, Pilatus was quoted proclaiming himself to be "the new Elvis", reasoning that by the duo's success they were more talented musically than Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. This was denied by Morvan in 2017, saying that Pilatus had never used those words and that the quote was taken out of context, likely due to Pilatus still not having a full grasp of the English language.
Unlike the international release of All or Nothing, the inserts for the American version of the album Girl You Know It's True explicitly credited the vocals to Morvan and Pilatus. This prompted singer Charles Shaw to reveal in December 1989 that he was one of the three actual vocalists on the album and that Pilatus and Morvan were impostors. Farian reportedly paid Shaw $150,000 to retract his statements, though this did not stem the tide of public criticism. On the 21 April 1990 episode of In Living Color, Keenen Ivory Wayans and Damon Wayans parodied Milli Vanilli in a sketch, mocking the duo's accents, fashion sense, and dance moves. This led to further jokes on the duo, such as David Letterman's Top 10 list on Late Night with David Letterman describing 10 jobs they could do other than music.
Because of growing public questions about who sang in the group, as well as Morvan's and Pilatus's demands to Farian that they be allowed to sing on the next album, on 14 November 1990, Farian announced that he had fired them and confessed that they did not sing on the records. Confronted by Los Angeles Times reporter Chuck Philips, Pilatus confirmed the deception. "It's True: Milli Vanilli Didn't Sing", read the newspaper's headline on 16 November 1990. "I feel like a mosquito being squeezed", Pilatus said. "The last two years of our lives have been a total nightmare. We've had to lie to everybody. We are true singers, but that maniac Frank Farian would never allow us to express ourselves."
Arista Records dropped the act from its roster and deleted Girl You Know It's True from their catalog, making it one of the largest-selling albums ever to be deleted. On 19 November 1990, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences formally revoked the group's Grammy Award for Best New Artist, marking the only time a Grammy was ever rescinded from an artist. The next day, Pilatus and Morvan gave a press conference in front of more than 100 journalists in Los Angeles, where they stated their willingness to return their Grammy Award. The duo said they had "made a deal with the devil", and they sang and rapped for the room to prove that, although they had not sung on their records, they could, in fact, sing.
After these details emerged, lawsuits were filed under various U.S. consumer fraud protection laws against Arista Records, Pilatus and Morvan. One such filing occurred on 22 November 1990, in Ohio, where lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit asking for refunds on behalf of a local woman in Cuyahoga County who had bought Girl You Know It's True. When the suit was filed, it was estimated that at least 1,000 Ohio residents had bought the album. On 12 August 1991, a proposed settlement of a refund lawsuit in Chicago, Illinois, was rejected. This settlement would have refunded buyers of Milli Vanilli CDs, cassettes, records, and singles. However, the refunds would only be given as credits for future Arista releases. On 28 August, a new settlement was approved; it refunded those who attended concerts as well as those who bought Milli Vanilli recordings. An estimated 10 million buyers were eligible to claim a refund, and they could keep the refunded recordings. The refund deadline passed on 8 March 1992.
Adding to the controversy, in December 1990, singer-songwriter David Clayton-Thomas sued Milli Vanilli for copyright infringement, alleging that the title song of All or Nothing used the melody from his 1968 composition "Spinning Wheel", a hit for his group Blood, Sweat & Tears. In an interview from the 2023 documentary film Milli Vanilli, the duo justified their work with Farian to escape poverty. The film, without describing them as innocent, points out that a great many people knew about the deception, but the singers became the scapegoats; the popular narrative was incomplete and misdirected at the two public faces of a much larger operation. In an interview about the film, Morvan said: "People thought they knew the story, but they didn't."