The memory is a little hazy on the specific details around both the concert and the press conference — and, in fact, the two seemed to happen just a few days apart instead of, in looking back on it, over a year apart (which should have immediately raised questions then about who all helped cover this up and for how long).
That lack of interest in the truth, particularly damning to any good journalism, remains frustrating to Morvan today as he reflects on being in that press room in 1990. He and Pilatus, two young Black men from Europe, were pelted with a barrage of questions from people more interested in pinning the entire scheme on them and why they “betrayed” their fans than anything else.
“It was like nobody did their homework,” Morvan said. “It was targeted towards Rob and Fab, Rob and Fab, Rob and Fab, Rob and Fab. What about — Let’s not say his name. What about the big boss? What about the big boss?”
That’s still too often the case when celebrity fandom devolves into public scorn. Details, like the fact that German producer Frank Farian orchestrated the facade and that vocal coach Seth Riggs opened that press conference noting how common it was to lip-sync performances and recalling that the duo wanted to perform live at the Grammys and was told not to, don’t really matter.
Were Morvan and Pilatus, age 24 and 26 at the time of their professional demise, participants in the ruse? Yes. Did they benefit in some ways from it? Most definitely. Were they complicit? Eh, the answer to that is a bit more complicated. And it involves exploring multiple issues throughout that time that contributed to it.
As the film shows, Morvan and Pilatus came from modest socioeconomic backgrounds in 1960s and ’70s France and Germany, respectively, with a genuine love for dance, music and American celebrity. Morvan recalled to me how he was charmed as a child watching images of Quincy Jones and a BBC documentary that featured the Beatles in a glamorous recording studio.
“As a poor kid, the only thing you think about is, ‘OK, we’re gonna get some clothes, we’re gonna go eat,’” Morvan excitedly remembered. “’We’re gonna get, like, clothing. And then we’re gonna work on that hair. Then we’re gonna be like, bam, the girls are gonna love us.’”
But there is also a natural sense of naïveté in Morvan’s reflection of his younger self. Neither he nor Pilatus fully comprehended their contract and so much of what they assumed it entailed is also what they projected onto it from their own fantasy. Their idea of celebrity was attached to clothes, girls, money, Michael Jackson.
But that guilelessness was like catnip to a music business that commonly preyed on those that were unaware, hungry — and oftentimes Black. Pilatus and Morvan weren’t just Black, though. They were Black and not American. “The European boys with no connection or protection were at the mercy of the beast,” Morvan added.
To some degree, the fact that Morvan and Pilatus were young, photogenic, Black and not American was an advantage of which they had some understanding. They got the girls and the fame that they craved, but they were also acutely aware that they were puppets that were there just to look at and not to listen to.
“It was schizophrenic in a sense that when I hit the stage, we got that love and we were able to make people happy,” Morvan told me. “It was a dream/nightmare. So, objectified, yeah. But I fell into the trap. I stayed in the trap. It was my own fault.” It got to a point where, as he reveals in the film, he and Pilatus were starting to believe their own lie.
Both Morvan and Pilatus turned to drugs and alcohol as their coping mechanisms. “When you start to consume it, it’s like, ‘Wow, I feel good. I can forget,’” Morvan recalled. “It was a form of therapy, ’cause it was numbing everything. And then you’re able to deal with the weight of what we were carrying.”
Some of that could be attributed to the fact that most of the group’s love interests in their music videos, like myriad pop videos at the time, were white women. But another aspect goes back to the marketing — not just the way Milli Vanilli were branded but also how many “crossover” nonwhite pop stars have been as well.
Resentment from Black fans has never been a concern from producers like Farian or record companies, and is too often understood as the price you pay for greater success. Milli Vanilli, perhaps unwittingly, got swept up into that.
“If you’re a Black artist and your image is being controlled by marketing departments that basically care very little and know very little about the broader cultural background from which you came,” McLeod said, “that creates some real dangers for misrepresentation.”
“The big question of the documentary as I went into it was: When did this begin to matter to people and why?” asked cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib, who is interviewed in “Milli Vanilli,” during our call together. “What part of the illusion, how deep did people buy into the illusion, and why did people buy into that illusion?”
It’s also part of our yearslong ritual of rapidly catapulting a figure into the spotlight — Milli Vanilli was only a beloved phenomenon for two years — only to gleefully watch them spiral downward. The way fandom often works is that when the invisible contract between celebrity and fan is breached, in this case a sense of trust, they want to see some kind of repercussions.
“We are a somewhat punishment-obsessed society,” Abdurraqib agreed and added that we have been for decades. “The more visible the person is, the more excitement there is with that. Milli Vanilli was a byproduct of that excitement and to take them down.”
But after everything went down so spectacularly for Morvan and Pilatus, and folks like Farian and Davis went quietly out of dodge, the duo were just left with themselves and had to pick up the pieces and try to move forward. Even after singing with their own voices on subsequent albums under new contracts and band names until 1993, they were already considered tainted.
The question of what happens next when someone has been scorned in this way is always a plaguing one, when you think about the fact that mouths still have to be fed and bills have to be paid. But, as Abdurraqib noted, that’s not anything the public considers, especially considering the rapidity of the pop culture cycle and the inhuman way Morvan and Pilatus were consumed.
“The idea was we can aggressively erase Rob and Fab from our public consciousness and then be on to the next thing,” Abdurraqib explained. “But the reality is there’s a life that has to be lived after that erasure. There’s a life that has to be lived beyond the relentless desire to punish.”
This content was originally published here.
