The year 1989 brought overwhelming success to the German pop duo Milli Vanilli. They won a Grammy for the Best New Artist for their debut release “Girl You Know It’s True.”
But when Milli Vanilli were singing the hit at an MTV concert in Bristol, Connecticut, something went wrong… The audio track jammed and began repeating just one line over and over again. Rob Pilatus – one of the band’s two lead performers told MTV that he wanted to die that moment.
“It stopped. “Girl, you know it’s… Girl, you know it’s…” You know, I couldn’t repeat it 15 times… 80 thousand people… So I stopped. I panicked. I ran offstage.”
The reason why Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan retreated so quickly was simple – they could not sing.
Their producer Frank Farian confessed later that Pilatus and Morvan were just a front. Two pretty faces who could dance, chosen to appear on stage and in videos while the real people who sang “Girl You Know It’s True” and other Milli Vanilli hits were left uncredited.
The whole Milli Vanilli affair turned out to be a case of a faux-group, the musical equivalent of ghostwriting.
The duo tried to get back into the music biz together, but in 1998 Pilatus was found dead in a hotel room in Frankfurt with a mix of alcohol and prescription drugs in his blood. His death was ruled an accident.
In the late 1980’s it took more than a year for Milli Vanilli’s empire to fall apart. Nowdays, when instead of MTV News Block people turn to Twitter, scandals in the music industry explode in seconds.
In February of 2017, America’s most “hated” man Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who hiked the price of HIV medication by 5,000 percent, went on an all-capital- letters Twitter tirade, saying he was scammed when trying to acquire rights to a musical record.
Shkreli wrote that he wanted buy out the new Kanye West album “The Life Of Pablo” and even paid the bitcoin equivalent of $15 000 000, so he could later resell the record to Kanye’s fans.
Surprisingly enough, the same weekend Kanye West sang two songs from the album on Saturday Night Live. And that probably led Shkreli to a conclusion that his latest acquisition is not quite his.
SOMEONE NAMED DAQUAN SAID HE WAS KANYES BOY AND I SIGND THE DEAL TO BUY PALBO AND SENT THE BITCOIN. CALL THE POLICE THIS IS BULSH*T
— Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) 14 февраля 2016
Apparently “someone named Daquan” had nothing to do with Kanye’s record label and disappeared with Shkrelli’s money, prompting the Brooklyn-born investor to go on with his Twitter rant. Some people, however, remained skeptical about the whole story, saying it could have been Shkreli’s own PR stunt.
Even though it’s almost impossible to lip-sync your way into the music hall of fame nowdays, the Internet brings new challenges to those in the music biz. And as long as fortunes will be made from recording albums and performing before live audiences, there will also be scammers around – people who are eager to go after all that money, success, fame and glamour.
