Recommendations of the Editorial team
The history of modern music is full of rivalries – friendly and not so friendly. The Beatles versus the Rolling Stones. Britney vs. Christina. Iggy Pop vs shirts. But with this year’s Grammy nominations, a new, almost absurd feud has emerged. Milli Vanilli’s Fab Morvan vs. the Dalai Lama and US Constitutional Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Each Grammy nominations list throws up some surprising names – see Bernie Sanders’ or Alex Trebek’s Grammy pages – but perhaps the most entertaining category is always that for Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording.
Previous winners include Edward R. Murrow, Dudley Moore, two Burns (George and Ken), Betty White – and Jimmy Carter no less than ten times.
Fab Morvan versus the Dalai Lama
This year it’s worth scrolling for the big musician categories up to “Category 70”. There, Jackson and the Dalai Lama are fighting for the Grammy crown – against one half of the infamous nineties pop duo.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is nominated for her memoir “Lovely One,” which the New York Times says is “deeply personal and hopeful.” “Meditations: The Reflection of His Holiness the Dalai Lama” combines the thoughts of the Dalai Lama with Indian classical music and pieces by Maggie Rogers and Rufus Wainwright. (Trevor Noah and actress Kathy Garver complete the field.)
But if anyone will be making headlines, it will be Fab Morvan with his autobiography, You Know It’s True. Milli Vanilli’s Grammy story is infamous. In 1990 the duo won the award for Best New Artist, but this was revoked when it was revealed that they had not sung their own songs. (Rob Pilatus, the second part of the duo, died in 1998.)
From scandal to possible redemption
“Fab experienced one of the most dramatic and surreal rises in music history,” says the book description. “At the height of fame, with number one hits and screaming fans around the world, it all came crashing down.”
(On a side note, if an artist wins a Grammy, loses it, and then wins again, does that count as their first Grammy? ROLLING STONE is investigating.)
If Morvan actually wins, it would be the culmination of a remarkable story of redemption – from the symbol of the biggest music scandal of the 1990s to a cautionary tale for an industry that today finds itself confronted with AI voices and semi-synthetic songs.
Producer Jermaine Dupri summed it up before the nominations were announced: “Wait a minute – Milli Vanilli lost their Grammy because they didn’t sing themselves. Now we accept songs that come from artificial voices? How is that different?”
So the Grammys – you can make fun of them all you want. But only there (and perhaps in a bad ’90s comedy act) can a sentence begin with: “A disgraced pop star, a Supreme Court justice and the Dalai Lama…”