What do Milli Vanilli have to do with the Menendez brothers

What do Milli Vanilli have to do with the Menendez brothers

1988. A duo climbs the charts of the United States (first) and the whole world (then) with a hit entitled “Girl you know it’s true”. They are called Milli Vanilli. Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus they are two charming boys, with a statuesque physique, a remarkable stage presence. In a matter of months thanks to hits like “Girl you know it’s true”, “Baby don’t forget my number”, “Girl I’m gonna miss you” and “Blame it on the rain” they will climb the global charts, selling over 40 million copies of records and singles and even winning the Grammy Awards in 1990 as “Best New Artist”: a spell that will suddenly break, when

it will turn out that the Milli Vanilli are a complete scamthat Morvan and Pilatus are actually two extras manipulated by producer Frank Farian, that those are not their real voices. The Grammy will also be withdrawn from himsomething that has never happened in the history of music, and the two will be condemned to oblivion.
2024. The United States and the entire world rediscover the Milli Vanilli. And the duo re-emerges from oblivion, even returning to the rankings. The credit does not go to TikTok, but to a TV series. AND “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez”, the Netflix series of the moment: directed by Ryan Murphy, tells the life of the Menendez brothers, convicted of the brutal murder of their parents in Beverly Hills. What do the Milli Vanilli have to do with it? Simple: the true story is set in 1989when the duo was at the height of their success. AND Milli Vanilli’s hits represent the heart of the soundtrack.

Thanks to “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez” Milli Vanilli’s catalog on streaming platforms is recording unprecedented peaks of streams. “Blame it on the rain” and “Girl I’m gonna miss you” also appeared in the ranking of the most viral songs on TikTok published by Billboard, which reports interesting data relating to the boom in Milli Vanilli’s hits on the platforms. The streams of “Blame it on the rain” they grew up of 68%those of “Girl you know it’s true” of 32.5%. Those of “Girl I’m gonna miss you” even of 258%: in the series it is played by one of the two killer brothers, Lyle, played by Nicholas Alexander Chavez (Cooper Koch plays the other brother, Erik), at the funeral of the two parents, disturbing everyone present, before the arrest. News reports of the time report that

several songs by Milli Vanilli, who in 1989 were the recording phenomenon of the moment in the USA, were actually played at the funeral of the Menendez couple. No less disturbing is the scene in which the two brothers sing “Blame it on the rain” in the car after purchasing the rifles to carry out the crime. Milli Vanilli appear several times in the soundtrack, as if their music acted as a Greek choir narrating the family tragedy. In the final scene, for example, the brothers are sentenced to life imprisonment, in separate prisons: Lyle and Eric exchange one last moment of eye contact as the vans take them away: the same “Girl I’m gonna miss you” plays in the background.

That of Milli Vanilli was a real one scandalwhich caused a sensation. It was whoever planned that scam, the manufacturer, who revealed everything Frank Farian. Copyright holder of the name Milli Vanilli, annoyed by the claims of Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus to sing for real in what would have been the successor to the album “Girl you know it’s true”, the producer called a press conference in Munich in November 1990 and confessed to the fraud: the two were perfect in how they moved, but the voice wasn’t suitable, so he had seen fit to give the duo other voices, those of three talented American r&b singers living in Monaco, Charles Shaw, Brad Howell and John Davies (this the last one died in 2021 from complications related to Covid).

The scandal had consequences on the lives of the two performers. In 1998 Pilatus died prematurely, at just 32 years old, due to an overdose: “This documentary will allow me to close a painful chapter in my life,” he said instead Fab Morvan, who is now 59 years oldtracked down last year by Luke Korem for a documentary dedicated to the history of the duo. “Milli Vanilli” was distributed exclusively by the streaming platform Paramount+, but it did not have who knows what effects on the duo’s catalogue. He didn’t even have it biopic “Girl you know it’s true”directed by the German Simon Verhoeven and released in the USA in August, in which the German Tijan Njie and the French Elan Ben Ali played Morvan and Pilatus.

.Maybe now the time is ripe for the bittersweet revenge of pop’s biggest scam.