Thirty-five years after being half of the first (and, to date, only) act to have a Grammy Award revoked, Fab Morvan of Milli Vanilli landed a second Grammy nod on Friday (Nov. 7) – best audio book, narration, and storytelling recording for You Know It’s True: The Real Story of Milli Vanilli.
Milli Vanilli, the red-hot pop duo of Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, was crowned best new artist on Feb. 21, 1990, beating out Neneh Cherry, Indigo Girls, Soul II Soul and Tone Loc. The award was presented by legendary songwriter Kris Kristofferson and rapper Young M.C., who also won a Grammy that night for best rap performance for his hit “Bust a Move.”
Their win was expected: By that point, their debut album Girl You Know It’s True had topped the Billboard 200 for eight weeks and had spawned five top five singles on the Billboard Hot 100 – the title track, “Baby Don’t Forget My Number,” “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You,” “Blame It on the Rain” and “All or Nothing.” They performed “Girl You Know It’s True” on the live telecast, making them the only best new artist nominees who performed on the show that year.
There had already been rumblings that Morvan and Pilatus had not actually sung on the album; that they were merely hired because they had the right look to push the act’s upbeat pop/dance/R&B confections to the top of the charts. But it was hard to know if the rumors were true or merely the product of jealousy because of the duo’s outsized success.
On Nov. 14, 1990, their producer, Frank Farian, confessed that Morvan and Pilatus had not sung on the records and announced that he was firing them. Five days later, the Recording Academy announced that it had revoked the duo’s Grammy. Ever since, the academy has acted like Milli Vanilli never existed. If you call up Milli Vanilli in the academy’s awards look-up tool, you will get no results. Their list of best new artist winners skips from Tracy Chapman, who won in 1989, to Mariah Carey, who won in 1991. If you call up Pilatus on the look-up tool today, it shows that this new nomination is his first.
The academy may wish Milli Vanilli never existed, or that its voting members had chosen another best new artist winner that year, but they did, in fact, win. To pretend otherwise is revisionist history.
Who might have won best new artist if Milli Vanilli hadn’t taken the prize? Soul II Soul won in two categories that night – best R&B performance by a duo or group with vocal for “Back to Life” and best R&B instrumental performance for “African Dance.” Indigo Girls won in one category – best contemporary folk recording for Indigo Girls. Tone Loc was nominated for best rap performance for “Funky Cold Medina.”
Will Morvan win on Feb. 1? The competition is tough, and almost comically eclectic. The other nominees are The Dalai Lama for Meditations: The Reflections of His Holiness The Dalai Lama; U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for Lovely One: A Memoir; comedian and five-time Grammy host Trevor Noah for Into the Uncut Grass; and Kathy Garver, an actress who played the oldest child on the 1960s sitcom Family Affair, for Elvis, Rocky & Me: The Carol Connors Story.
Morvan was part of the Grammy conversation last year when the documentary Milli Vanilli was entered for best music film, but it wasn’t nominated. The doc was directed by Luke Korem and produced by Korem and Bradley Jackson.
While the story of Milli Vanilli’s rise and fall is amusing in some respects — there was endless mockery of them on the popular sketch variety show In Living Color and by such talk show hosts as Arsenio Hall and David Letterman — one must not forget that one of the members of the duo, Rob Pilatus, died young (in his early 30s) and tragically. Pilatus was found dead in April 1998 from an alcohol and prescription drug overdose. The death was ruled accidental.
