It’s 2024, and America is madly in love with Milli Vanilli. How did this happen? The Eighties Euro-glitz pop duo are enjoying the year’s weirdest revival, thanks to Ryan Murphy.
His Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story tells the true-crime story of the rich Beverly Hills brothers who gunned down their parents in the summer of 1989.
They bond over the music of Milli Vanilli, who ruled the radio that summer. Since Monsters, the duo’s streaming numbers are booming. “Blame It on the Rain” and “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” just debuted on this week’s TikTok Top 50 in Billboard. It might sound too bizarre to be real—but girl, you know it’s true.
It’s sweet vindication for Milli Vanilli, the most controversial pop stars of their day. Fabrice Morvan and Rob Pilatus were two Munich club kids, Black European dandies scoring excellent post-hip-hop MTV bubblegum bangers, dancing like acrobats and dressing like Cher. They had it all: the flashiest hair, the tightest pants. They scored three Number One hits and won the Grammy for Best New Artist. What could go wrong?
The crash came when their producer revealed Rob and Fab didn’t sing any of the vocals on their records. They got stripped of their Grammy, the only time that’s ever happened. Their hits got banished from the radio, never to return until now. Both were crushed by the lip-synching disgrace; Rob Pilatus became a tragic drug casualty, dying in 1998. “Imagine walking in my shoes,” Morvan told Rolling Stone last year. “Having to carry that ball and chain for years.”
Morvan told his story in Milli Vanilli, the 2023 documentary by director Luke Korem. But the post-Monsters boom is something new. According to Billboard, the Vanilli catalog had a 114 per cent streaming increase after the Netflix series premiered. “Blame It on the Rain” jumped 68 per cent, “Girl You Know It’s True” 32.5 per cent, and “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” an astounding 258 per cent.
Monsters is the true-crime anthology drama from Murphy and Ian Brennan. Season One chronicled serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer; Season Two tells the tale of the Menendez brothers. Erik and Lyle were 18 and 21 when they killed their parents, José and Kitty Melendez, with shotguns, in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion. They claimed it was self-defense, after years of abuse from their father. Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez play the brothers, Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny the parents.
In one of the strangest scenes, Lyle plays a Milli Vanilli slow jam at the parents’ memorial service, “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You,” which really creeps out the funeral crowd.
You might suspect Ryan Murphy is overdoing it — but it turns out this really happened. Biographer Robert Rand, author of The Menendez Brothers, has confirmed, “Several Milli Vanilli songs were played at the DGA memorial for Jose and Kitty Menendez on August 25, 1989.” As Murphy told Vanity Fair, “The choice of Lyle playing a Milli Vanilli song at his parents’ memorial—you really can’t make up.”
In Monsters, the brothers sing along with “Blame It on the Rain” in the car radio after buying the shotguns. Within days of the murders, they’re spending fortunes on Rolex watches, cars, and stereo equipment. The Vanillis are all over the soundtrack, serving as a Greek chorus narrating the family tragedy. But Murphy uses the music brilliantly. In the final scene, the brothers get sentenced to life without parole, in separate prisons. Lyle and Eric exchange a final moment of eye contact as the vans drive them away, to the sound of “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You.”
Since then, Vanillimania is off the charts. There’s even a brand new reggae version of “Blame It on the Rain” from the Grammy-winning producer NomaD, featuring a cameo from Fab Morvan. (“NomaD is in the house, Fab is in the house! We about to make history, bro!”) Songwriter Diane Warren appears in the video.
This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when Milli Vanilli were demonized as everything wrong with pop music. They’re still the only act that’s ever had to return their Grammy. “Did you hear what happened to the award?” Morvan asked me last year. “It’s broken and sitting in the Grammy Museum. They broke it, and put it on a shelf. I thought, ‘Oh my God, they went that far?’”
First things first: absolutely nobody in 1989 thought Rob and Fab were doing the singing. And nobody cared. Look, it was the Eighties — nobody thought Bruce Willis could really climb skyscrapers. If you went back in time to 1989 and told the average pop fan that Milli Vanilli were lip-synching, the reply would have been, “No shit, Sherlock.” If you really wanted to shock people, you’d tell them, “Someday Paula Abdul will be chosen as the judge of a TV singing contest.”
But the industry got really outraged over Milli Vanilli, because they were a radical new pop aesthetic. Rob and Fab were a swirl of different racial and cultural signifiers, turning the underground hip-hop beat of “Paid In Full” into the trendy Euro-sleaze of “Girl You Know It’s True.” (Live, they added the opening bars of Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise,” for bonus blasphemy value.) They mixed up disco, rap, and house fads into rootless cosmopolitan mega-pop for a hip-hop world. Rob and Fab were pretty boys who played up their homoerotic allure. Post-race, post-gender, post-music — in a decade that really overdid the prefix “post,” Milli Vanilli were the post-est of the post.
Paris-born Fab and the German Rob were outsiders from the start. They met at a Munich party, shocked to see each other. “There was not many Black people in Munich,” Fab says in the Milli Vanilli doc. “We were the only two dark-skinned people.” Both came from abusive childhoods, and they instantly bonded as family. “He was my older brother,” Morvan told me last year. “He brought me into the fold. I didn’t speak German very well. He was my protector, in many senses.”
They started a group called Empire Bizarre, and devised their look, starting with the hair. But they were very different. Fab was the strong silent type; Rob was the trouble-maker. “People really didn’t like my dude,” Morvan said. “Rob was hurt as a young boy for being a mixed race. It was rare in the environment that he grew up in. So I think that there was a switch, when he became a famous break-dancer—now he wanted to be feared instead of loved.”
Producer Frank Farian, already a Eurodisco legend as the man behind Boney M, recruited them as the faces of his new pop franchise Milli Vanilli. They took the money and partied hard, especially Pilatus. “Because of his prior history — coming from an orphanage, and stuff that happened to him in the orphanage—he was more prone to addiction. People used to call us the Good One and the Bad One, because he had a—what do you call that — a reputation in Munich. He was a bad boy. But we connected. Music was the glue for us.”
They found fame and fortune in America, where they led a new breed of slutty Club MTV dance-pop, with artists like Paula Abdul, Soul II Soul, and the Fine Young Cannibals, pushing the wubba-wubba agenda. Their videos were a scream, especially their aerial chest-bumps. Even their interviews were funny, as when Pilatus explained the group’s name in his fractured English: “In Turkish it means something very positive; and we chose Vanilli because we liked Scritti Politti, and we wanted to have an ending like this. So you see, it’s quite complicated.” John Leland, the era’s great pop critic, compared them to the Sex Pistols and declared, “Milli Vanilli are the future, your future.”
But they didn’t make friends at the top. Pilatus went off the rails with drugs and diva ego. “Musically, we are more talented than any Bob Dylan,” he told Time. The night they won their Grammy, a fan came over to congratulate them, but Pilatus scoffed “Later” and walked away. The fan was Paul McCartney.
The louder he boasted, the more obvious it was that he wasn’t the suave American voice fans heard on the radio. “Everybody ask me if I sing on this record,” Pilatus told Rolling Stone. “Even my mother ask me. I am very proud person, and this is embarrassing…I have to go through this again and again, till I get cancer in my stomach and die.”
There was something not-like-us about Rob and Fab — their accents, their androgyny, their fashion sense, their flamboyant foreign-ness — that made them easy targets, especially in a U.S. industry overrun by boomers who despised pop kids. The backlash was an ugly eruption of racism, nativism, and homophobia. (They weren’t gay, but many Americans assumed they were a couple.) They were a punch line on In Living Color, where Rob was mocked for having green eyes. When Farian exposed their lip-synching, it was covered like a global news event, but also like a celebration. “It was like a piñata, like little kids in a birthday party,” Morvan said. “Everybody’s hitting and hitting, then waiting and waiting. Okay, today the candy’s falling?”
Farian released an album by “The Real Milli Vanilli,” titled The Moment of Truth, while Rob and Fab released their own album; combined sales probably didn’t reach triple digits. The duo’s one moment of post-Milli greatness was a TV ad for chewing gum, rushed out surprisingly fast after losing their Grammy. It’s a comedy gem where they lip-synch to opera.
When they crashed, they brought the whole Eighties Top 40 spectacle down with them. Rob and Fab became an anti-pop cautionary tale. It took a decade for the TRL era of Britney/Backstreets/NSync to bring back the dirty-pop sound that Milli Vanilli pioneered. Radio yanked their hits from rotation, which is partly why the Monsters soundtrack is having so much impact—people are hearing these tunes for the first time, and liking what they hear.
The Milli Vanilli story is a lot like how Monsters presents Erik and Lyle: two blood brothers trapped in a miserable lie, with nobody to trust except each other, vulnerable but hiding behind a glam facade. Both duos devise a plot to fool the world, but fail. For all their crimes, it’s touching when the Menendez brothers share a final glance to “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You,” just as it’s poignant to see Fab at the end of the doc, wowing a live festival crowd, crushing “Blame It on the Rain” with just his voice and guitar.
In our moment, where we’re all haunted by the prospect of AI deepfake pop, there’s something reassuringly old-fashioned about Milli Vanilli. Rob and Fab had real personality, you know? They had star power, humor, moves, flesh-and-blood magnetism. You could tell these guys started out friends. You could also tell they had a desperately needy lust for strangers’ attention, peacocking way too hard. Their flaws, like everything else about them, were human. That’s why now is the right time for Milli Vanilli to finally make sense to us. Blame it on the rain.
From Rolling Stone US
