Did Milli Vanilli really do wrong?

To those who don’t know, Milli Vanilli, a pop group of the 80s, had its grammy revoked when it was discovered that their award-winning song wasn’t sung by them. They were just lip-synching to a song sung by someone else.

This was Frank Farian’s idea - the one who formed and managed the group that was fronted by Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus. Why? Because Farian felt that the original singers lacked a marketable image.


Well, according to current music standards, singers don’t generally make it unless they have a particular image do they. I’m not talking about all those sad gits queueing up for American Idol and its other global copies. Such shows will have to select the best copycats - there’s nothing original about the music style of any of these ‘idol’-style contests - whether they look like they had ten too many t.v. dinners in the course of a single movie or were as tone-deaf as William Hung who seemed to have a voice more suited to shouting out orders in a takeaway. It is, after all, a contest that attempts to make ‘entertainment’ out of the selection process through juvenile ridicule and contempt levied by morons such as Simon Cowell, or others singers who made it because they'd cut a fine ‘marketable’ figure on stage or in a cathouse. As the ‘idol’ contests are thrown open to the general aspirationally-challenged public, they will have to go for the best sounding whatever their appearance. It’s sort of like a lottery that enables some of the peasants to ‘make it’ so as get the rest of the peasantry to attribute their pathetic state to bad luck rather than the class system.

But that’s not the case when it comes to ‘artistes’ whom are discovered through the usual selection process by ‘talent’ scouts, etc. It surely can’t be a coincidence that the best singers are the ‘best’ looking right. And even if some of these ‘good looking’ ‘stars’ are good singers, they do their utmost to maintain their figures, etc, in order to be marketable don’t they. And looking at all these ‘stars’ since the 90s, are they really different from each other? Whether it be in appearance or style of singing and songs? Aren’t they just replicas, or aren’t they just different marketable bodies put on the same kind of song so that the capitalists might have more same sounding sources of revenue than just one? Are there many or any popular bands who made it these days that are as physically variable as the Mamas and the Papas?

We shouldn’t victimise Milli Vanilli for being nothing more than a more blatant example and pioneers of what is the norm these days.
So, in this sense, aren’t Milli Vanilli conforming to the standards of these days? You could say that they were before their time. Very advanced. In the 80s, you could still get lots of singers and bands whom were very different from each other in fashion, singing styles, and so on, and whom were part of the same pop scene, and very popular. In other words, there was more originality those days. That’s not the case these days. Slightly different faces, same song, same style, same everything. They may be singing their own songs, but they are a testament to the perspective that it is only appearances that matter, not the variation in style and song. So Milli Vanilli, in the 80s, taking it a step further and not singing their own song and fronting it with their marketable image in a time when there was still great musical variation would be pretty radical don’t you think.

It’s like the music industry is saying, we’re always on the lookout for a different face for the same kinda song. And as more and more singers come up, doing the same style of song, sporting the same kind of style and appearance, aren’t they just, essentially, ‘lip-synching’ the song, style and silhouette of those that came before them? Nothing original about that even if they are singing it and sporting it themselves. Essentially, they are just a marketable image, and nothing more, like Milli Vanilli. It seems that people felt really stupid about Milli Vanilli as they had to face the fact that they went for them because of their looks and not because they actually sang the song. It sort of revealed to the people their own superficiality. So the music industry’s response to that was making sure that people sang their own songs, even if it was no different from any other. Nothing original about that either is it.

So give the grammy back to Milli Vanilli. We shouldn’t victimise Milli Vanilli for being nothing more than a more blatant example and pioneers of what is the norm these days. You may not want to agree with me, but, girl, you know it’s true......ah.





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