Do You Remember: The Milli Vanilli Lip-Sync Disaster

The Great American State Fair, planed as part of the USA's 250th anniversary celebrations, is one of the most hilarious things I've seen all year. The pathetically politicised and gloriously cheap line-up of "great" musical acts included MC Lyre, C&C Music Factory, and Milli Vanilli. Yes, really. Almost everyone has dropped out because nobody wants to be part of Trump's jackassery. You know things are bad when Bret Michaels has to jump ship.

I know I had the same questions as everyone else about the entire charade, one of the big ones being: wait, didn’t one of the guys in Milli Vanilli die? Is it Milli or Vanilli that’s performing for the Trump party? And will they be lip-syncing? Yes, the jokes wrote themselves, but you don’t waste your good material on barrels this loaded with fish. It feels like a whole other timeline where the scandal of a Grammy winning musical duo being revealed as frauds was the biggest drama of the moment. If it happened now, the scammers would lean into it, release some AI-generated slop tunes, and probably get an endorsement from Jake and/or Logan Paul. But it’s true, kids. Once upon a time, even in the consciously artificial world of pop, integrity mattered. Sort-of.

Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan did start out as a legitimate singing duo. Born in Munich and Paris, respectively, they met in Los Angeles in the '80s and tried to find work as both back-up singers and their own act. It was tough, and like many aspiring musicians of the time trying to make it big in Hollywood, they struggled financially. This was the era of MTV absolutely dominating the pop discourse, and the age of the music video pushed forward a new focus on aesthetic. Some artists were experts at navigating this new space, like Madonna and Prince, who both blended cinematic inspirations with postmodern irony and radical raunch. But a lot of acts just didn't know how to work the camera. Couple that with MTV's blatant racism of the era, and the ruthlessness of the decade was in no danger of being diminished.

Frank Farian, a German music producer, had achieved fame as the guy who created (and did a ton of vocals for) the disco band Boney M. This white German guy recruited a bunch of Black vocalists and had Bobby Darrell lip-sync to his vocals. It led to a ton of hits, some of which are classics of the genre, like "Rasputin." Weirdly, it had never been much of a secret that Farrell wasn't singing on the group's record. This wasn't all that controversial a practice at the time. It was a practice dating back to Hollywood's classic musicals, where even legendary singers like Angela Lansbury were dubbed by ghost performers like Marni Nixon. It would take a couple of decades for these uncredited ghost singers to get proper credit and royalties.

Since it had worked so well with Boney M, Farian had the idea to do it again for the '80s R&B pop scene. He assembled a group of session musicians – Charles Shaw, John Davis, Brad Howell and the Rocco sisters, Linda and Jodie – and decided he needed a cute, magazine-cover-ready pair to be the faces of this project. Pilatus and Morvan were very hot in a very '80s manner. They were also only 24 and 21 years old, and they needed the money. So, they signed the contract, not understanding what it was they were agreeing to. Why would they ever think they weren’t being hired to sing?