"What was the betrayal? Did anyone in America believe that the Village
People or the Monkees really sang themselves? The Archies? Please.
Everyone's been doing it for 25 years. Madonna, Janet Jackson--these
perfect dance shows are expected now. So the best way to go onstage is
with tapes.
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-12-31/entertainment/ca-5618_1_milli-vanilli/2
But despite all the outrage over Milli Vanilli, no one should expect artificial pop groups to disappear. Farian says it's American consumers who need to wise up. "Sure, for young kids, it's very powerful to hear that the heroes are not on stage, but in the studio," he says. "But the kids have to learn, have to open their eyes. We sell illusions and they are not reality. That's a good lesson for every kid to learn."
It’s no secret that groups have been fabricated throughout the history of pop music. Most of the Monkees early music was done by studio musicians, there’s the Partridge Family (seriously now), and it’s believed the Village People were not the ones singing on their albums. The list goes and on. Beyond that, in other areas of the entertainment industry, such as movies, the end product is a result of numerous contributors with the actors, who play a relatively minor role relative to the amount of credit they get, often simply being the face of the product of sometimes literally thousands of people’s work. Beyond that, numerous celebrities (and even professional authors) “write,” and take complete credit for, books in which they really just hired a ghost writer to pen the actual thing based on (sometimes extremely few) notes and ideas from the listed author. Nobody bats an eye at any of that.
So why was everyone picking on Rob and Fab?
WELL, FIRST OFF, BECAUSE THEY WON A GRAMMY,
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/11/day-history-november-19th-lip-synching-duo/
People were outraged and acted like it was the first time that music listeners had ever been taken in by records that didn't scrupulously reveal who was the actual creative force behind them. But in dance music, in particular, producers had been creating fake group and artist names to slap onto their studio creations forever. So when Milli Vanilli was revealed to be a manufactured group like the Archies, I was like, so what?
Prelude to Milli Vanilli: Other artists who didn't play on their own records
http://musicweird.blogspot.com/2014/03/prelude-to-milli-vanilli-other-artists.html
1.Lawrence Welk Zero-Zero" and "Breakwater- (George Cates)
2.Sheb Wooley "Purple People Eater" - studio musicians
3.Jackie Gleason album "Music for Lovers Only"- according to Hackett, Gleason's only contribution was to pay the musicians/trumpeter Bobby Hackett.
4.Ace O'Donnell, and countless other honky-tonk pianists (Knuckle Fingers Joe, Fingers Mahoney, Hap O'Hallihan, Crazy Fritz, Puddin' Head Smith, and Knuckles O'Toole. Most of those artists didn't really exist.)real stars, like Crazy Otto, Frankie Carle, and Big Tiny Little,
5.The Crystals "He's a Rebel" and "He's Sure the Boy I Love," (Darlene Love and the Blossoms.)
6.Willy Henson hired as Tobin Matthews "Ruby Duby Du" -' Tobin Matthews' created name (unknown studio musicians)
7.Franklyn Baur "Hallelujah'' (Charles Kaley.)
8.The Rubettes. Their #1 hit (Sugar Baby Love) was sung by Paul Da Vinci. http://musicweird.blogspot.com/2014/03/prelude-to-milli-vanilli-other-artists.html
9. Gary Lewis and the Playboys-recorded by studio ringers including Leon Russell and Hal Blaine
10.Ohio Express and 1910 Fruitgum - (Joey Levine was the voice behind both)
11.Partridge Family: Even Cassidy, who was a musician as well as an actor, had to fight to get the producers to allow him to sing for real on the show. As he told Lauer, he was hired for his teen-idol looks, not his musical ability.
“Doing the pilot, I was lip-syncing somebody else’s voice,”
Cassidy said. Only when the show was picked up by ABC was he allowed to sing. https://www.today.com/popculture/get-happy-partridge-family-stars-reunite-wbna35663539
12. The thing that gets lost is that [lip syncing] was not a unique practice in the music business. Eliot Sekuler (MV’s outside publicist
My first PR gig was with Casablanca Records and we had the Village People, who didn’t sing on their first record. What was unique, and became problematic, was that these guys had tried to conceal it and went on tour and they weren’t singing on stage either. What was unique was the success they had, and the Grammy win, and that was their downfall. The business would be very unforgiving with them when they learned they had nothing to do with the records.
Eliot Sekuler (MV’s outside publicist): I was on the MTV tour already with Paula... where [a number of the acts] were just singing to a recording. [Milli Vanilli] had a fairly elaborate playback system for its time, a digital device that was unusual for them. And it failed. It got stuck while they were on stage.
https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/8551402/milli-vanilli-oral-history-lip-syncing
The more recent examples in pop music are too countless to mention them all, but artists like Jennifer Lopez, TLC, Selena Gomez and Britney Spears have all released records that employed “ghost singers” The only real differences between all the artists that did it before Milli Vanilli is the speed at which Milli Vanilli became successful, and the fact they won a Grammy. When you look at all the examples dating back to the very beginning of the music industry, and the now ubiquitous use of Auto-tune, Melodyne and other pitch correction technology it’s hard not think that Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan were dealt with a little harshly.
https://traxploitation.co.uk/milli-vanilli
But despite all the outrage over Milli Vanilli, no one should expect artificial pop groups to disappear. Farian says it's American consumers who need to wise up. "Sure, for young kids, it's very powerful to hear that the heroes are not on stage, but in the studio," he says. "But the kids have to learn, have to open their eyes. We sell illusions and they are not reality. That's a good lesson for every kid to learn."
It’s no secret that groups have been fabricated throughout the history of pop music. Most of the Monkees early music was done by studio musicians, there’s the Partridge Family (seriously now), and it’s believed the Village People were not the ones singing on their albums. The list goes and on. Beyond that, in other areas of the entertainment industry, such as movies, the end product is a result of numerous contributors with the actors, who play a relatively minor role relative to the amount of credit they get, often simply being the face of the product of sometimes literally thousands of people’s work. Beyond that, numerous celebrities (and even professional authors) “write,” and take complete credit for, books in which they really just hired a ghost writer to pen the actual thing based on (sometimes extremely few) notes and ideas from the listed author. Nobody bats an eye at any of that.
So why was everyone picking on Rob and Fab?
WELL, FIRST OFF, BECAUSE THEY WON A GRAMMY,
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/11/day-history-november-19th-lip-synching-duo/
People were outraged and acted like it was the first time that music listeners had ever been taken in by records that didn't scrupulously reveal who was the actual creative force behind them. But in dance music, in particular, producers had been creating fake group and artist names to slap onto their studio creations forever. So when Milli Vanilli was revealed to be a manufactured group like the Archies, I was like, so what?
Prelude to Milli Vanilli: Other artists who didn't play on their own records
http://musicweird.blogspot.com/2014/03/prelude-to-milli-vanilli-other-artists.html
1.Lawrence Welk Zero-Zero" and "Breakwater- (George Cates)
2.Sheb Wooley "Purple People Eater" - studio musicians
3.Jackie Gleason album "Music for Lovers Only"- according to Hackett, Gleason's only contribution was to pay the musicians/trumpeter Bobby Hackett.
4.Ace O'Donnell, and countless other honky-tonk pianists (Knuckle Fingers Joe, Fingers Mahoney, Hap O'Hallihan, Crazy Fritz, Puddin' Head Smith, and Knuckles O'Toole. Most of those artists didn't really exist.)real stars, like Crazy Otto, Frankie Carle, and Big Tiny Little,
5.The Crystals "He's a Rebel" and "He's Sure the Boy I Love," (Darlene Love and the Blossoms.)
6.Willy Henson hired as Tobin Matthews "Ruby Duby Du" -' Tobin Matthews' created name (unknown studio musicians)
7.Franklyn Baur "Hallelujah'' (Charles Kaley.)
8.The Rubettes. Their #1 hit (Sugar Baby Love) was sung by Paul Da Vinci. http://musicweird.blogspot.com/2014/03/prelude-to-milli-vanilli-other-artists.html
9. Gary Lewis and the Playboys-recorded by studio ringers including Leon Russell and Hal Blaine
10.Ohio Express and 1910 Fruitgum - (Joey Levine was the voice behind both)
11.Partridge Family: Even Cassidy, who was a musician as well as an actor, had to fight to get the producers to allow him to sing for real on the show. As he told Lauer, he was hired for his teen-idol looks, not his musical ability.
“Doing the pilot, I was lip-syncing somebody else’s voice,”
Cassidy said. Only when the show was picked up by ABC was he allowed to sing. https://www.today.com/popculture/get-happy-partridge-family-stars-reunite-wbna35663539
12. The thing that gets lost is that [lip syncing] was not a unique practice in the music business. Eliot Sekuler (MV’s outside publicist
My first PR gig was with Casablanca Records and we had the Village People, who didn’t sing on their first record. What was unique, and became problematic, was that these guys had tried to conceal it and went on tour and they weren’t singing on stage either. What was unique was the success they had, and the Grammy win, and that was their downfall. The business would be very unforgiving with them when they learned they had nothing to do with the records.
Eliot Sekuler (MV’s outside publicist): I was on the MTV tour already with Paula... where [a number of the acts] were just singing to a recording. [Milli Vanilli] had a fairly elaborate playback system for its time, a digital device that was unusual for them. And it failed. It got stuck while they were on stage.
https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/8551402/milli-vanilli-oral-history-lip-syncing
The more recent examples in pop music are too countless to mention them all, but artists like Jennifer Lopez, TLC, Selena Gomez and Britney Spears have all released records that employed “ghost singers” The only real differences between all the artists that did it before Milli Vanilli is the speed at which Milli Vanilli became successful, and the fact they won a Grammy. When you look at all the examples dating back to the very beginning of the music industry, and the now ubiquitous use of Auto-tune, Melodyne and other pitch correction technology it’s hard not think that Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan were dealt with a little harshly.
https://traxploitation.co.uk/milli-vanilli
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5V2pIsKiVI
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