Word: pilatus
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Here's an idea: give the withdrawn Grammy to Arsenio Hall. He started all this. "We were tired of being made fun of by Arsenio Hall," said Rob Pilatus, 25, at a rowdy press conference in Los Angeles last week. Pilatus, one half of Milli Vanilli, was struggling to explain how the duo's yearnings for legitimacy had provoked their German record producer, Frank Farian, into confirming what had long been show-biz rumor: that Pilatus and Fab Morvan, 25, were in fact techno-puppets, fronts for a studio-manufactured sound that sold 10 million copies of the album Girl...
Alas, Milli Vanilli is also heard from. "Musically, we are more talented than any Bob Dylan," announces Robert Pilatus, 24, with very little prodding. "Musically, we are more talented than Paul McCartney. Mick Jagger, his lines are not clear. He don't know how he should produce a sound. I'm the new modern rock 'n' roll. I'm the new Elvis." His (often silent) partner, Fabrice Morvan, 23, has his own key to success: "Rhythm, you know...
...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...
...much worse than the Millis can things get? Their lighter-than-airhead lyrics and freeze-dried hip-hop rhythms combine pop and pap in tunes for instant consumption and rapid oblivion. Pilatus, the son of a German striptease dancer and an American soldier, was raised in Munich by an adoptive family. Morvan was born in Paris ("My father installed the air conditioning; my mother was a chemical biologist"). They hooked up in 1985, when both were in Los Angeles...
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...