Milli Vanilli

Milli Vanilli
Fab Morvan (left) and Rob Pilatus (right) with NARAS President C. Michael Greene (center), February 1990
Background information
Also known as	Rob & Fab
Origin	Munich, West Germany
Genres	Dance, new jack swing, R&B, funk, Eurodance, hip hop
Years active	1988–1990, 1997–1998
Labels	Arista, Hansa
Associated acts	The Real Milli Vanilli, Rob & Fab
Past members	Fab Morvan Rob Pilatus

Milli Vanilli was a German R&B duo from Munich. The group was founded by Frank Farian in 1988 and consisted of Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus. The group's debut album Girl You Know It's True achieved international success and earned them a Grammy Award for Best New Artist on 21 February 1990. Milli Vanilli became one of the most popular pop acts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their success quickly turned to infamy when Morvan, Pilatus and their agent Sergio Vendero confessed that Morvan and Pilatus did not sing any of the vocals heard on the record. The pair decided to return the Grammy awards and asked they be given to the real vocalists. The group recorded a comeback album in 1998, but Rob Pilatus died before the album was released.

According to VH1's Behind the Music, the single "Girl You Know It's True" was first produced by Jesse Powell and had already been completed before Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan were recruited. Frank Farian felt that no efforts should be focused on refining Pilatus and Morvan's voices. Farian added his own studio-augmented voice to recordings, using back-up singers to hide the other two members' voices live.

In 2011 Morvan claimed that Farian manipulated the two by giving them a small advance when he signed them. The pair spent most of it on clothes and hairstyling, then several months later Farian called them back and told them they had to lip sync to the prerecorded music or, per the contract, repay the advance in full. "We were not hired, we were trapped" Morvan recalled.

Beth McCarthy-Miller, then an executive with MTV, says the duo's poor English language skills, when they came in for their first interview with the channel, stirred doubts among those present as to whether they had sung on their records. The first public sign that the group was lip-synching came on 21 July 1989, during a live performance on MTV at the Lake Compounce theme park in Bristol, Connecticut. As they performed onstage live in front of an audience, the recording of the song "Girl You Know It's True" jammed and began to skip, repeating the partial line "Girl, you know it's..." over and over on the speakers. They continued to pretend to sing and dance onstage for a few more moments, then they both ran offstage. According to the episode of VH1's Behind the Music which profiled Milli Vanilli, Downtown Julie Brown stated that fans attending the concert 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 musically more talented than Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger.