Trivia / Milli Vanilli

• Breakthrough Hit: "Girl You Know It's True."
• Creator Backlash: Fabrice Morvan more or less treats his past with Milli Vanilli as a cautionary tale.
• Creator Killer:
  • Their career came crashing to the ground in 1990 when it was revealed that the faces of the band were not only lip-syncing during live shows, but that they never recorded the vocals on the album at all, the songs having actually been sung by other artists in the studio (who, after the controversy, recorded an album of their own as The Real Milli Vanilli. This also didn't go over well with the public). This was enough for the duo to have their Grammy for Best New Artist be withdrawn.
  • The lip-syncing debacle also led to Frank Farian's once-stellar career to derail, though he did have a brief comeback in the mid-Nineties producing international hits by the groups No Mercy and La Bouche.
• Development Hell: The planned comeback, Back and In Attack, will probably never see release now, due to Rob's death.
• Died During Production: The group was planning a comeback with Rob singing lead,^note Fab refused to work with Frank Farian ever again after the first debacle, and politely told him to shove it when presented with the offer. and the "Girl You Know It's True" vocalists as back-up singers. Their album, Back and In Attack, was cancelled when Rob suddenly died of a drug overdose in 1998. A few years earlier, Rob and Fab (who had already recorded as Empire Bizarre before the creation of Milli Vanilli) released a new album of their own performances, without the Milli Vanilli moniker. Despite a promotional appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show, the album fell afoul of distribution problems, and very few copies made it to stores. Since Rob's death, Fab Morvan has recorded as a solo artist, and has made European TV appearances singing Milli Vanilli's hits. Obviously, his renditions sound absolutely nothing like those of the original vocalists.
• False Credit: The reveal that Rob and Fab did not sing either in live concerts nor on any of the band's recorded material would eventually spell doom for their career and overshadow all of their music in the public eye.
• Genre-Killer: Beyond just the collapse of their own careers, the lip-syncing affair triggered a strong backlash against dance-pop that lasted well into The '90s and fueled the growth of both "alternative" genres (such as Alternative Rock, adult alternative, Gangsta Rap, and Hip Hop Soul) and easy listening.
• Non-Singing Voice: What they're best known for. Both "The Real Milli Vanilli" and Rob & Fab attempted to avert this, but nobody bought it.
• Referenced by...:
  • The Argentinean humor show Peter Capusotto Y Sus Videos had a sketch called "Micky Vainilla"^note "Vanilla Micky" about a pop singer styled after Adolf Hitler who sang pop songs about white supremacism and inferior castes. Micky, of course, was named after the band.
  • Barenaked Ladies reference the MV hit "Blame It on the Rain" in their own song "Blame It on Me."
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Their fame and fortune abruptly ended just a year after their breakthrough album, Girl You Know It's True, was released. On November 14, 1990, producer Frank Farian confessed to the Los Angeles Times that Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus did not sing on any Milli Vanilli recordings. Farian went to the press because the rumors swirling around the group could no longer be avoided, but also because he balked when Rob and Fab demanded to be allowed to actually sing on their new album. The story caused a chain reaction of events that resulted in the duo's Grammy Award for Best New Artist being withdrawn, Arista Records voluntarily destroying all unsold copies of Girl You Know It's True and the album masters, and dozens of lawsuits against the duo from customers demanding refunds. Despite this, they actually didn't immediately die off from the fallout, as the duo continued performing up until co-frontman Rob Pilatus died of a drug overdose in 1998.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: Not an entirely positive one, as you can imagine. Even after bubblegum pop became socially acceptable to enjoy again, every single act has been under scrutiny for authenticity, be it lip-syncing or Autotune, in fear that another Milli Vanilli will happen. Still, it wasn't all bad: the incident's notoriety did lead to the creation of a law which requires all music albums to credit exactly who provides the vocals, which still exists to this day and helped certain singers get out of similar jams shortly after, most notable being Martha Wash, who successfully sued C+C Music Factory after her vocals on their their mega-smash "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" were mimed by a younger, slimmer actress in the music video.

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