Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Blame It on the Feign, Part 2

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🗓️ 28 May 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

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Summary

In Part 2 of this episode of Hit Parade, Chris Molanphy continues his analysis of Milli Vanilli, the musical act that many of us who were around in 1989 listened to more than they might admit. They also have quite a legacy: a blend of pop, dance and rap that now seems commonplace but was still relatively novel then. If you’ve danced to Europop that fronts like hip-hop, you’re living in a world Milli Vanilli helped create.

Chris Molanphy continues to break down the history of Milli Vanilli mastermind Frank Farian’s musical career: from his burst of Billboard chart success, to the storied past of the Best New Artist Grammy award. From MTV News to Behind the Music, the Milli Vanilli story has been told and retold. But the Billboard chart feats achieved by Rob and Fab, and their accomplices, reveal just how addicted America was to their music—and maybe, how they won that Grammy.

Hit Parade episodes are now split into two parts, released two weeks apart. For the full episode right now, sign up for Slate Plus and you'll also get The Bridge, our Trivia show and bonus deep dive. Click here for more info.

Podcast production by Asha Saluja with help from Rosemary Belson.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:13.0	Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from
0:20.1	coast to coast. I'm Chris
0:21.9	Melanphy, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series?
0:27.7	On our last episode, we talked about the curious history of Millie Vanilli, now regarded as
0:34.8	pop music's biggest fraud ever.
0:46.8	But as far back as the 70s, group creator Frank Farian was already experimenting with non-singing frontman,
0:49.9	as in his Europop group, Boney M.
0:56.8	That disco-era act didn't score any big hits in America, but Farian's 80s project,
1:05.0	fronted by non-singing frontmen Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvon, was scoring a string of massive U.S. hits.
1:13.3	The only question was whether Rob and Fab could keep the charadeade going as Millie Vanilli grew ever bigger.
1:29.9	Bristol, Connecticut looked like it was about to be Millie Vanilli's Waterloo, the moment when they very publicly went down in defeat. On July 21, 1989, at a date on the Club MTV tour in Bristol in front of thousands of
1:38.9	screaming fans, the backing track supplying Rob Palatis's and Fabrice Morvon's vocals, got stuck in a loop.
1:48.1	This rub, you know, this, rub, you know, this, rub, you know, this grab, you know, this grab, you know.
1:55.0	This piece of footage is the most damning evidence in the Millie-Vinilly story.
2:00.6	It's frankly amazing in the era before
2:03.5	camera phones or even light camcorders that this moment was captured on tape at all. As the story goes,
2:11.5	Rob Palatis ran off stage, mortified, convinced the game was up for him and Fabrice, and he had to be coaxed back
2:20.0	on stage by Club MTV host downtown Julie Brown. So with a bit of pushing and screaming,
2:27.1	a couple of F words, I think, as well, I got them back out there. And the funny thing is,
2:32.7	they got back out there, and nobody cared.
2:35.6	The audience didn't care. It was more basically people were laughing at them behind the scenes,
	...

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