I try to make this column a Donald Trump-free space. But, man, some weeks it’s a really difficult thing to pull off.
The man spends an unhealthy amount of time in my head. In his first term, it was often a case of “have you heard what the idiot said today?” This second time around, it has gotten a lot harder to laugh off his antics. But sometimes you still just have to shake your head.
Take this week, for instance. The Trump administration had a number of artists lined up to perform at the Freedom 250 concerts later this month. Called the Great American State Fair, the shows were organized as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations.
They weren’t exactly A-listers to begin with. My apologies if Bret Michaels, Martina McBride or Young MC happen to be your favourite, but like so many things Donald Trump has touched, things quickly unraveled this past week, as one by one the singers pulled out of the event claiming that it had become too political and divisive.
The fact these artists had the common sense (belatedly so) to not want to be associated with the event is not the funny part of this story. It’s the musical chaff that’s been left in the wake of these exits that’s the real story.
One has to wonder who was booking these acts in the first place. Clearly, they hadn’t listened to much music since the halcyon days of MTV in the 1980s and early 90s, because what we’re left with are the likes of Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli.
Mr. Ice (a.k.a. Robert Van Winkle) has become little more than a novelty act. His hit “Ice Ice Baby” became the first rap song to hit number one on the Billboard Top 100 in 1990, but he’s been riding that success for 36 years with little to show since.
But the punchline here is Milli Vanilli, and if you’re not old enough to remember their meteoric rise (and fall), then please allow me to educate you.
Milli Vanilli, comprised of Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, was a pop duo from Munich, Germany. Founded in 1988 by producer Frank Farian, they combined pop, rap, R&B, disco and dance music. In 1990, they won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist.
Along with the title track, their debut album, “Girl You Know It’s True,” also included the hits “Blame It on The Rain” and “Girl I’m Gonna to Miss You.”
Well, you might want to blame it on the rain, but girl, none of it was true, as it turned out, as it was quickly revealed that Milli Vanilli couldn’t sing a lick, and that Fab and Rob hadn’t sung a single note on the album. The gig was up when, during a live performance on MTV, the backing track for their hit song skipped and began the looping the phrase “Girl You Know It’s…” Farian later called a press conference to admit that the duo were not the voices behind the Milli Vanilli songs and that it was a group of session singers who had actually recorded the album.
The Recording Academy quickly took the unprecedented move of stripping Milli Vanilli of their Grammy, and the rest is history. Tragically, Pilatus died of an accidental drug and alcohol overdose a decade later after years of struggling with substance abuse and illegal issues following the scandal, but Morvan is still at it, though it’s unclear, to me at least, what “it” is.
Morvan did actually manage to earn an Emmy Award – which they allowed him to keep – for his contributions to documentaries and memoirs detailing the real story behind Milli Vanilli. But he’s also managed to cobble together some sort of authentic singing career, or at least one successful enough to get an invite to perform at the Trump concerts.
Perhaps it’s only fitting that three and a half decades after the fraud was exposed, Morvan has finally returned to the spotlight as one of the headliners for these shows, because you’d be hard pressed to find a musical act that better represents the Trump presidency than Milli Vanilli.