Milli Vanilli

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Milli Vanilli

Milli Vanilli were a pop and dance music project formed by Frank Farian in Germany in 1988, fronted by Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus. The group's debut album achieved high sales internationally which earned them a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1990. The act sold over 30 million singles[citation needed], 14 million albums[citation needed] and became one of the most popular pop acts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, their success turned to infamy when their Grammy was revoked after it was revealed that the actual vocals on the record were not the voices of Morvan and Pilatus. In 1998, ten years after Milli Vanilli's debut, Pilatus was found dead in a Frankfurt hotel of an apparent drug overdose.
Milli Vanilli's debut album All Or Nothing, was released in Europe in mid-1988, with Rob and Fab front and center and no mention of the actual singers. The success of the record caught the attention of Arista Records, who signed the duo and added a new track penned by Dianne Warren, "Blame it On The Rain" renaming it to Girl You Know It's True for release in the American market in early 1989. This version of the album failed to chart and so it was again repackaged with new tracks and remixes as All Or Norhing (The U.S. Remix Album). This version of the album went 6 X platinum and led to the re-release of the title track, which peaked at number 2 on the Hot 100 in April of that year and was certified platinum (the song was a cover version of a Numarx track published in 1987 on the US Bluebird label). The U.K. release featured the original first album and the remix album together as "2 X 2". Even greater commercial success followed, as the pair's next three singles "Baby Don't Forget My Number", "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You" and "Blame It On The Rain" all reached number 1. A fifth and final single "All or Nothing", also made the Top 5 in the beginning of 1990 in a remixed form which sampled the "Keep On Moving" beat from UK soul act Soul II Soul. Milli Vanilli's meteoric rise to pop music superstardom culminated with a Grammy Award for Best New Artist on February 22, 1990.