Milli Vanilli: Last News

The creator of pop group Boney M Frank Farian has died aged 82.

Fab Morvan recalls one of the last times he saw his “Girl You Know It’s True” partner Rob Pilatus before his death from an accidental overdose in 1998.It was outside the Viper Room rock club in Hollywood, California, where the fallen pop star — disgraced after the lip-syncing scandal that forced the duo to return the Best New Artist Grammy it won in 1990 — was now far from the green-eyed heartthrob he once was when they were MTV sensations.“I see a dude stumbling across the way,” says Morvan, 57, in the doc. “As he was falling, his body turned, and I looked into his eyes, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is not true.’ I’m looking at Rob Pilatus.”Then Morvan took Pilatus home — to what appeared to be a crack house.Nine years after Milli Vanilli had a string of chart-topping hits in 1989 — “Girl You Know It’s True” was followed by consecutive No.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s one of the inside-out realities of our era that scandal, if you give it enough time, turns into myth. So it is with the story of Milli Vanilli, the German-French R&B pop duo of the late ’80s and early ’90s who, having sold close to 50 million records, were revealed to be a fake: a pair of lip-syncing Euro pretty boys who hadn’t sung a note on any of their hits or at any of their concerts. Once they’d been unmasked, the rise and fall of Milli Vanilli played out on two levels. The first was the spectacular embarrassing bad joke of it all — though it was never just a joke, since Milli Vanilli’s fans felt a tremendous sense of anger and betrayal at having been fooled. (The joke was on them.) The second level recognized a crucial and obvious truth: that the scandal wasn’t only about Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, with their teenybop dreads and break-lite dance moves, getting up onstage and singing to prerecorded tracks, as if it had all been their idea. No, the brazen fakery of Milli Vanilli echoed, or at least rhymed with, various other kinds of fakery that were embedded in the music industry (the packaging of boy bands, the use of lip-syncing by established stars). This was certainly more extreme, and worthy of being called on the carpet for, but it wasn’t a stand-alone sin.

Winning the Best New Artist at the Grammys is one of the highest honors a performer can receive, but some observers have long believed that the trophy can be more of a curse than a blessing.