Her biggest hit was called “Girl You Know It’s True”. But what truth means in contrast to its opposite, the forgery, the lie, the fib, maybe just not taking the truth that seriously because we like the truth, perhaps -not-yours-but-it-is-at least-ours: that is the question in all of human existence and in art anyway and especially in pop music, and that was also the question, which was brought up again by this duo at the end of the 80s, perhaps for the last time, at least in the pop enclosure.
Today it’s hard to understand the excitement over the scandal that Milli Vanilli caused back then when it came out that they hadn’t actually sung their super-successful half-hip-hop, half-R’n’B songs themselves, but that they had only sung them as good-looking and well-moving stage figures moved their lips to the music that their producer Frank Farian had recorded with competent session musicians in his studio in Rosbach vor der Höhe near Frankfurt. Actually, that was already clear back then, because Frank Farian’s most successful creation to date, Boney M., in the 1970s also consisted of stage characters who moved to the music created by him and his session musicians. But somehow the old adage “Once you lie, you won’t be believed…” didn’t apply to him.
Or at least people believed Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, the two handsome and agile stage dancers that Farian cast in 1988 for the music he produced. At least the two of them were allowed to have a say in the band name; they called themselves Milli Vanilli because they liked Scritti Politti so much and it sounded so similar, and Frank Farian’s assistant at the time also went by the pet name Vanilli. With “Girl You Know It’s True”, the two journeymen, who had previously been aimlessly striving for fame, achieved an international career straight away, the records sold like hot cakes, they went to Los Angeles and risked a very big lip there, “our contribution to the Music history is bigger than the Beatles,” they said in an interview, and according to John Lennon, the Beatles were already bigger than Jesus Christ and everyone else who believed that they brought the truth to humanity.
What else could come after that? For example, complete bankruptcy. Megalomania, stubbornness on all sides and other imponderables meant that Rob and Fab absolutely wanted to go on tour singing in the USA. Then they were exposed and things went downhill pretty quickly.
Can we learn something from this story for our present, in which truth no longer plays a role? Simon Verhoeven has now made a film out of the Milli Vanilli affair that, firstly, raises this question by constantly switching between the levels of reality and fakery, but secondly is unable to answer it, and thirdly, it is definitely worth seeing because Matthias Schweighöfer plays Frank Farian and in a fantastic way reconciles the roles of the cynical, lying producer asshole with that of the nerd, who is totally deeply immersed in the music and in love with every single sample, every single bass drum sound, so much so that you can’t stop hugging him I want to tell him: You may be a liar, but you’re one of the kind we sorely miss today.