What if the Milli Vanilli lip-synching scandal never happened?

[SodaMan1996]

In 1988, German producer Frank Farian founded Milli Vanilli, a dance-pop duo consisting of Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus.

Their debut album, All or Nothing, was an instant international success. However, the duo's success began to unravel in 1989, when a hard drive malfunction caused one of their songs, Girl You Know It's True, to skip and repeat one of the lyrics.

People began suspecting that Morvan and Pilatus never actually sang the vocals. Once that was confirmed to be true in November 1990, the scandal effectively destroyed their reputation. They were made to give back their 1990 Grammy Award for Best New Artist, and pop music as a whole suffered such an extreme backlash that pop music stopped being popular in the U.S. for several years.

Not until the release of the Spice Girls' Wannabe in 1996 would pop music become popular in the U.S. once again.

What if the Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal never happened? What if Farian had Morvan and Pilatus actually sing their own vocals? How would pop music evolve here in the U.S. in this alternate early-to-mid 1990s?

 

[ordinarylittleme]

Well, if they sang their own vocals, the songs wouldn't be the same so they wouldn't sell the same.
If the hard drive doesn't malfunction they would continue on being successful, possibly there would be tribute acts.

 

[Popcorn]

They were under suspicion even before the tape skipped.

 

[Fuzzy Dunlop]

TOTPS (Top of the Pops) continues to allow artists/bands to use backing tapes?

 

[Reflection]

Heh, I always felt like Rob and Fab got so much undeserved hatred and vitriol for the scandal, when they were just two performers who got paid to do a job, and had nothing overall to do with the plan itself. It took a tragic turn when Rob died of a drug overdose in 1998.

I think a better POD would be that Milli Vanilli was out in the open in the beginning, with the actual vocalists upfront at the start. They tried to do that later, marketing themselves as "The Real Milli Vanilli" but obviously that didn't stick due to the association at that point.

If such a monumental backlash never happened, I can see '90s music being quite different, perhaps lessening or even preventing the Grunge era. Many pop acts had their careers vanish overnight as the '90s really kicked off, as their styles were seen as lame or passe, and I think this had bled into rock music as well.

By that, I mean Alternative Rock Radio in the late '80s up until Smells Like Teen Spirit was way different than what many thought of as alt rock afterwards. It was dominated by New Wave, Post-Punk, Synthpop, Dance acts that played everything from new wave, college rock, electronica, funk, synthpop, and were well... "poppier" than grunge era acts. Without the backlash to pop style music in general at the time, perhaps that's how it would stay?

 

[Gabingston]

I still think they'd go out of fashion by '93 at the latest. They just weren't very interesting as an act, and the music scene was inevitably going to change from what it was at the turn of the 90s.

 

[AltHistoryNerd]

They last for a second album. The second album sells well. For their 3rd album, they sound good enough to sing without the aid of lip syncers. Frank Farian tries to blackmail Rob and Fab.... Doesn't work. Frank Farian ends up destroying his career.

 

[Neoteros]

They last for a second album. The second album sells well. For their 3rd album, they sound good enough to sing without the aid of lip syncers. Frank Farian tries to blackmail Rob and Fab.... Doesn't work. Frank Farian ends up destroying his career.

AFAIK, both Rob and Fab felt like they'd been scammed by Farian, the lip sync deal was forced on them by him; the duo turning the tables on Farian, that's a very plausible outcome, especially if Rob and Fab get the "real" Milli Vanilli on board, too.

Even though both acts' days were numbered anyway, they could've kept working in the industry in other roles, occasionally releasing new material and, you know, not fucking dying.

 

[SodaMan1996]

After reading those replies, here's my take:

Like Reflection said, alternative rock likely continues to be more "poppy", since in our timeline, grunge rose in no small part because of the anti-pop backlash.

Plus, a lot of pop singers saw their careers stagnate throughout the early-to-mid 90s in our timeline. The result was that a lot of pop singers outside of America weren't even able to make it onto the charts, one of whom was Kylie Minogue.

Without the anti-pop backlash, international pop stars like Minogue likely would have been more prominent here in the U.S. (for example, her hit single "Put Yourself in My Place" probably would have topped the charts here in the U.S. in late 1994 or early '95).

 

[Popcorn]

They were under suspicion even before the tape skipped.

Yep. The singing was a bit too clear for a couple guys who spoke with such heavy accents and a few journalists had already brought it up.

 

[Johnharry]

They could actually sing, my guess is Farian just thought their audibly European accents werent marketable.

So a third album could work but Farian probably didnt want to invest in actually training up their vocal capacity etc (“Rob and Fab” had pretty good material the album is still on youtube.)

But lets assume Farian takes pity on their situation (it is possible, because it seems he felt enough guilt to try and give Pilatus a comeback before his tragic death) and they release a third album….

It will likely perform similarly, perhaps less well, not because they werent talented but because musically not much new would be brought to the table.

But it would have saved Robs life as he simply couldnt handle the whole “scandal” and its fallout OTL….

If you got time, recommend watching this:

 

[Screwhorn77]

I think what a lot of people miss about the whole Milli Vanilli thing is that it was nothing new for European pop acts to have an unrelated person lip-sync to vocals they did not record. There's Bobby Farrell in Farian's other big success, Boney M., but that practice been going on for a while at this point. In a country as obsessed with authenticity in music as the US, this wouldn't obviously fly, but such things tended to be kind of open secrets in Europe. Milli Vanilli ended this practice with how infamously they fell, but there's a possibility it would linger on for a bit longer if their scandal never happened.

 

[badfishy40]

Even though milli vanilli crashed and burned I still like the songs they made. I was 19 then in '89 while in the army in Germany and it was everywhere back then. It kind of grew on me.