Marketing Drowns Out Music : Grammys: The Milli Vanilli affair is an embarrassment to the recording academy, which was seduced by the duo's album sales, not its lightweight songs. (2024)

The biggest embarrassment in the Milli Vanilli affair is that the lip-syncing duo was awarded a Grammy in the first place.

In picking Milli Vanilli as the best new artists of 1989, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences voters were simply seduced by record sales.

The Grammys are designed to salute excellence in the recording industry--and it’s hard to imagine anyone with even the slightest musical sophistication being impressed by the lightweight, teen-oriented dance-pop on the Milli Vanilli album “Girl You Know It’s True.”

Milli Vanilli was never about artistry--as indicated by Rob Pilatus’ admission Thursday that neither he nor partner Fab Morvan sang a note on the album.

Milli Vanilli was an exercise in marketing in the video age--and it was spectacularly successful.

Does anyone think the voters would have selected Milli Vanilli as the best new act of the year if “its” album had sold 70,000 copies instead of 7 million?

So, it’s doubly embarrassing now that the academy, which sponsors the Grammy competition, is being so timid in taking the first step toward correcting the error.

Instead of sending an immediate telegram to Pilatus and Morvan demanding the return of the Grammy statutes, the academy c-r-a-w-l-e-d into action Thursday by announcing that it would conduct a review of the situation.

A review?

What is there to review?

The academy’s rules require that the singers whose names appear on the album have to actually sing on the album to be eligible for a Grammy, and here we have Pilatus telling us he didn’t sing on the record. We also have Frank Farian, the German producer of the Milli Vanilli album, confirming it.

So what’s the problem?

What’s the academy going to do when it finally decides that Milli Vanilli has to return the Grammys: Ask them “pretty please”?

The larger problem is that the Milli Vanilli award isn’t an isolated blunder. The Grammy track record over the last 20 years in saluting new artists isn’t very encouraging.

What names come quickly to mind when you think of the most acclaimed pop artists of the last two decades? Prince, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Elton John, Sinead O’Connor, David Bowie?

None won a Grammy for best new artist.

Instead, the academy voters have honored the likes of America, the Starland Vocal Band, Christopher Cross, A Taste of Honey and Debby Boone.

The outlook isn’t good. If Grammy voters have had trouble separating artistry and commerce before, the problems are going to be compounded in an age where a large segment of the young pop audience is more interested in a good video than in a good record.

Truth be known, many fans would prefer having a couple of pretty faces and hot dancers--like Pilatus and Morvan--in a video or in a concert, even if they’re lip-syncing, than two average-looking singers who can’t dance a lick.

Those same fans are so enamored of videos that the important thing in concert isn’t hearing someone sing live, but being caught up in a re-creation of the energy and excitement of the video.

The Milli Vanilli situation is just an extreme example of a shell game that has been part of the pop experience. Studio musicians--often uncredited--have frequently sat in for band members over the years during recording session. Concurrently, engineers have employed technology to disguise the weaknesses of countless of singers.

That’s why live shows were always considered a sort of moment of truth. Singers had to prove live that they could handle the song without the various vocal enhancement devices employed in the studio.

But that’s no longer true.

Technology has become so sophisticated and audiences apparently so undemanding that sound engineers can work just as many wonders in a concert hall as they can in the studio. Prerecorded tapes to beef-up a band’s instrumental sound are commonplace, and acts as prominent as Madonna, Janet Jackson and the New Kids on the Block have been the subject of “is it live or is it Memorex?” speculation concerning their concert vocals--none of which has hurt ticket sales, it should be noted.

This is an outrage to most pop purists, who argue that part of the excitement of a concert is in an artist expressing the emotion of the moment--an extra enthusiasm or an unexpected gentleness that wasn’t offered on the recorded version of the same song.

If a new generation of fans prefer a recreation of the videos, so be it. Is it really any different than the scores of hollow, recycled pop-rock acts that go out on stage night after night and play the same music in such a passionless fashion that the whole thing might as well be prerecorded?

In retrospect, all Frank Farian, who masterminded the Milli Vanilli album and campaign, did was recognize this new reality in pop and act accordingly. He was probably as surprised as anyone else when his creation was honored by the academy.

What’s ahead?

With the conflicting standards among pop fans these days, it is important that Grammy voters carefully focus on the traditional values of singing, songwriting and musicianship--which is what they should have been doing all along. Otherwise there is no difference between the Grammy awards and the American Music Awards, which make no bones about merely honoring popularity.

Warning stickers are big these days in the record industry. So, maybe the academy should take advantage of this week’s revelations and place a sticker on the ballots it sends to Grammy voters in January: Listen to the music, not to the cash register.