In February 1990, two young men in bold outfits collected the Grammy for Best New Artist in Los Angeles. Nine months later, the award was taken back, making it the first time a Grammy winner had been stripped of a trophy, and it all started with a recording that would not stop repeating itself.
Lip-syncing, where performers mouth words to a recording, is common in pop shows. The problem here was that the voices on the record were not theirs, and the album credited them as the singers.
Who were Milli Vanilli?
The duo was Milli Vanilli, made up of Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan. German producer Frank Farian built the act around a song called ‘Girl You Know It’s True’, which took off in Germany in the summer of 1988. The tune was not even original. It had first been recorded by a band called Numarx.
The album came out in Europe that November as All or Nothing. It was repackaged for the US under the song’s title and released in March 1989.
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Sales were huge. By January 1990, the album had been certified six times platinum in the US and had produced three number one singles. Pilatus and Morvan were the faces of all of it, in videos, on posters and on stage.
The night the song got stuck
On 21 July 1989, the pair performed at Lake Compounce, an amusement park in Bristol, Connecticut, during a live MTV show. Partway through the title song, the recording jammed. A hard drive problem made one partial line of the chorus repeat over and over, cutting off before the final word.
The voice kept looping while the men on stage kept moving. Pilatus ran off the stage. He later recalled that he knew right then it was the beginning of the end.
It did not end the act. The duo won Best New Artist at the 32nd Grammy Awards on 21 February 1990, the biggest night in American music, and took home three American Music Awards that year.
The admission and the revocation
Questions kept building. In mid-November 1990, Farian publicly admitted that Pilatus and Morvan did not sing on the album. Sources put the date between 12 and 15 November.
The vocals were done by studio singers, among them Charles Shaw, a US Army veteran who recorded in Germany. The album credits had listed Fab and Rob as the vocalists.
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A 2023 documentary account says the duo threatened to reveal the secret after Farian refused their demands, and that Farian went public first. Pilatus and Morvan said they were singers who had not been allowed to be heard.
On 19 November 1990, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences revoked the Best New Artist award. Guinness World Records lists Milli Vanilli as the first Grammy winners to be stripped of the award.
What came after
Fans reacted fast. Radio requests stopped and album sales stalled. A class-action lawsuit was filed in Ohio on 22 November 1990, seeking refunds for people who had bought the album. Girl You Know It’s True was later reported to be the biggest-selling album ever to go out of print.