The hitmaker who tricked listeners with Milli Vanilli
Frank Farian knew Milli Vanilli wasn't a great band. The German producer created the group in the 1980s by casting two male models. Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan didn't have strong voices, but Farian saw potential in their looks, so he had them lip-sync to music recorded by other vocalists — and it worked, at first. The 1989 album Girl You Know It's True garnered three No. 1 singles in the U.S. and sold more than 10 million copies. But the scheme unraveled quickly. At one show in 1989, the vocal track skipped and repeated the same few words, and a panicked Pilatus simply ran offstage. When Milli Vanilli won the 1990 Grammy for Best New Artist, Farian knew the award would only bring greater scrutiny. "I was not happy when everyone was saying, 'Yay, Milli Vanilli won the Grammy,'" he said.
Born Franz Reuther, Farian was raised by his mother; his soldier father had been killed during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. He grew up "on a steady diet of American rock 'n' roll records," said The New York Times, and when he began singing himself, he soon topped the West German charts with the soft-rock ballad "Rocky" (1976). But his real success came when he switched from performing to producing. Before Milli Vanilli, he created Boney M., a disco group popular across Europe that continued to tour into the 1990s.
After Milli Vanilli imploded, "the accusations of deception never seemed to affect Farian," said The Guardian. He "was back within a few years," scoring even more European hits with another boy band, No Mercy. Over his career, he sold more than 800 million records. And he didn't seem to have much regret about the Milli Vanilli ruse. "It was two people in the studio, and two people onstage," he said. "One part was visual, one part recorded. Such projects are an art form in themselves."
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