The history of contemporary music is littered with hundreds of rivalries both amicable and otherwise. The Beatles versus the Rolling Stones. Britney versus Christina. Iggy Pop versus shirts. With this year’s Grammy nominations, a new feud has emerged to top them all: Milli Vanilli’s Fab Morvan versus the Dalai Lama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Each year’s list of nominees always bring some unlikely people to the party — looking at you, Bernie Sanders’ and Alex Trebek’s Grammy pages — and the most quietly fun category is Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording. Past winners include such odd interlopers as Edward R. Murrow, Dudley Moore, two non-musical Burns (George and Ken), Betty White, and 10-time (?!) nominee Jimmy Carter.
For this year, scroll past the A-list musicians in the big categories and land on “Category 70,” which will find Jackson and the Dalai Lama battling for Grammy supremacy against one-half of the disgraced Nineties duo.
Brown is nominated for her memoir, Lovely One, which the New York Times called “deeply personal and full of hope.” Meditations: The Reflection of His Holiness the Dalai Lama features the Dalai Lama’s reflections over Indian classical music and pieces by Maggie Rogers and Rufus Wainwright. (Trevor Noah and actress Kathy Garver round out the nominees.)
But it’s Morvan’s memoir You Know It’s True that will earn the most ink if he wins. The group’s Grammy history is hardly illustrious, winning Best New Artist in 1990 and then getting it revoked after it was revealed they did not sing on the album and lip-synced through performances. (Rob Pilatus, the group’s other member, died in 1998.)
“Fab lived one of the most dramatic and surreal rises the music world has ever witnessed,” a description of the book reads. “At the height of fame, with chart-topping singles and screaming fans worldwide, everything imploded.”
(Not for nothing but as a fun aside, if an artist wins a Grammy, gets it revoked, then wins again, are they technically a first-time Grammy winner? Rolling Stone investigates.)
If Morvan wins, it could signal the apex of a redemption arc that found him going from the industry’s most disgraced figure to a sad figurehead of the morally dubious machinations of an industry that is now running head-on into AI vocals and quasi-legitimate tracks.
Trending Stories
“So let me get this right, years ago the industry found out that Milli Vanilli weren’t really the voices on their Grammy winning record and they were stripped of their Grammy,” Jermaine Dupri tweeted before the nominations were announced. “But now we’re getting ready to accept people who can’t even sing, creating songs for a fake person? How is this any different than Milli Vanilli?”
So yeah, make fun of the Grammys all you want. But it’s only here and a 1990s hack standup act can you start a sentence with, “A disgraced pop star, a sitting Supreme Court justice, and the Dalai Lama…”
