The 12 months was 1990 and the Grammys Greatest New Artist class included a spread of genres, from Neneh Cherry and Tone Loc to folks duo Indigo Ladies and home music icons Soul II Soul.
And Milli Vanilli.
The pop duo, fashioned by Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, have been introduced because the winners by Kris Kristofferson and Younger MC.
In a 2020 interview with Selection, Morvan recalled, “Rob and I hugged one another and celebrated. It could have appeared like pleasure and happiness. However inside it was pure confusion. We knew this may come again to chew us within the butt.”
And that it did.
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The duo infamously turned the primary and solely act in historical past to have a Grammy Award revoked.
The German group was fashioned in Munich by music producer Frank Farian and shortly turned a world sensation with hits like “Woman You Know It is True” and “Blame It on the Rain.”
They turned one of many greatest acts of the late ’80s and early ’90s, particularly amongst younger ladies (e.g. D.J. Tanner and Kimmy Gibbler singing “Blame It on the Rain” in an early episode of Full Home).
And but, it was all pretend.
In November 1990, Farian lastly revealed the reality: that Pilatus and Morvan had by no means sung a observe on any of their smash hits.
In performances and music movies, they merely lip-synched.
When it got here to the Grammys, few artists have ever been permitted to lip-synch throughout performances on the massive evening.
“I’d agreed to do it for the primary time with Janet Jackson just a few years earlier, as their [Milli Vanilli’s] administration [the late Sandy Gallin and Jim Morey] threatened to drag them off the present. They have been so scorching on the time, we went alongside. However they have been good at it — even I assumed they have been singing,” Grammy producer Ken Ehrlich revealed to Selection.
Farian reportedly determined to show the reality after the duo expressed their needs to sing on their subsequent album.
Because of the following scandal, then-Recording Academy head Michael Greene revoked their Greatest New Artist award on Nov. 19, 1990.
“I hope this revocation will make the business assume lengthy and laborious earlier than anybody ever tries to drag one thing like this once more,” Greene stated on the time, in keeping with Selection.
Nonetheless, the duo had reportedly already determined to return the Grammy Award on their very own, regardless of the revocation.
They requested the award be given to John Davis, Brad Howell and Charles Shaw, studio singers who sang on the Milli Vanilli album.
In the long run, nobody was awarded the Greatest New Artist nod that 12 months.
“We have been seduced and really younger. We had no life expertise. We have been using the wave. It was a loopy journey. We have been getting loaded, making an attempt to flee, always in concern of being found,” Morvan stated in 2020.
“We’ve been carrying this cross for a very long time. We’ve been blamed time and again. We have been victims of our personal desires of stardom, chewed up and spit out by the document business machine,” Morvan added.
“My dream was to be a singer-songwriter. I’m in a position to look within the mirror right this moment and be pleased with what I see,” he shared.
As of the 2020 Selection piece, he lived in Amsterdam. Pilatus, however, tragically died of an unintentional drug overdose in Frankfurt, Germany in 1998.
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Gallery Credit score: Jessica Norton