Екзополитика - какво е това животно?
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.”
When I tell them what I’ve been up to, they think it sounds like a waste of time. Sitting at a cafe writing or coding, what kind of life is that?
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.”