Word: milli
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Milli Vanilli. Madonna. Paula Abdul. You can't be a pop star these days if you don't dance. And what keeps you on your toes isn't just a choreographer and a trainer; it's the sheer momentum from all the money out there to be made, not by performing but by succeeding. Success can't be separated from impact anymore. Marketing and merchandising are integral parts of the pop machine, just as a movie's box-office receipts become part of its cachet. Show business is the latest American spectator sport, and the number of weeks a tune...
...Milli Vanilli has so far survived the hilarious barbs of Arsenio Hall, + almost unanimous critical disdain and its own supercilious egotism to score a total of five Top Five singles. Even the hotly debated rumor that they don't do their own singing in live performance doesn't diminish their commercial luster. "If I'd heard the first Milli Vanilli record, I would have signed them," says Geffen Records president Ed Rosenblatt. Notes Jeff Gold, a vice president at Warner Bros. Records: "They may not be what I listen to when I go home, but they have good looks...
...rock concerts too? New Jersey assemblymen Neil Cohen and Joseph Mecca think so. They have introduced a bill that would require promoters to inform fans when an artist gyrates to canned music instead of real singing. Lip syncing has become routine at concerts by such big names as Milli Vanilli, New Kids on the Block and Janet Jackson...
Thanks, boys. Perhaps some of that abrasiveness comes from youth. But more of it may be a way of combatting the pasting that Milli Vanilli has received from such precincts of rock traditionalism as Rolling Stone (Worst Album and % Worst Band -- 1989 Critics' Picks Poll). Rockers, of course, hardly mess at all with dance music, which is all right with the Millis. "We have only gotten bigger and bigger," says Pilatus about all the flak. "It just makes me more aggressive, and if I get aggressive, I get better. If I get better, it's worse...
...Milli Vanilli is, as Pilatus says, "just a fantasy name," and their whole success is a kind of fairy tale, a musical fable for this uncertain transitional time in rock. The Millis go down easy, and easy, for the moment, looks like enough. This is not to suggest, however, that the Millis are unaware of their social impact. "Like a friend of mine went to Africa," Pilatus reports. "And there was no soap and no Coke. But there was Milli Vanilli...