This new documentary will have you rethinking Milli Vanilli's legacy

If you think you know the story of Milli Vanilli, a new documentary out on Paramount+ might have you thinking twice.

Aptly titled Milli Vanilli, the film unpacks the lip sync scandal behind one of the biggest acts of the late '80s.

Today on Commotion, the doc's executive producer Hanif Abdurraqib joins host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to discuss the legacy of the scandal, and what the media and fans might've missed when it first broke.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Let me start by saying I confess to you that when I hear the words "Milli Vanilli," which is not often, it is always in the context of a joke. I think what you made here is a corrective in a sense. What would you say is the thesis of this documentary?

Hanif: The big goal was to zoom out and have a lens on the group that was not just rooted in what happened to them — fixing the story of Milli Vanilli to two young Black guys who had dreams so large that they were exploited. Sometimes when you have a big dream, and you feel like you can go to any lengths to achieve it, exploitation kind of latches onto you.

They ran into Frank Farian, who was an expert in a very specific kind of exploitation. A lot of the documentary was attempting to not only contextualize their downfall, but to also add some kind of emotional hues to it, to expand beyond just the duo being a joke.

WATCH | Official trailer for Milli Vanilli:

Elamin: Behind, I think, every artist being exploited in the music industry is usually a contract that they signed without maybe fully understanding everything that is in the fine print. We've seen a lot of conversations about the kind of contracts that people get trapped into. Rob and Fab of Milli Vanilli were no different. What happened there in terms of the contract that they signed?

Hanif: They signed a contract that stated they would not be singing on these songs. They got paid some money upfront…. They were very young, 21 and 24 years old, and they had been grinding for a bit. They were dancing on these music video shows in Amsterdam, and they were trying to break larger. They were living in poverty, and so to get any level of money up front that felt substantial was ideal. They signed without looking at the fine print, and then they had the news broken to them that they were going to sing on the records. By the time they coped with that and decided they don't want to do that, it was kind of too late, because they would have to pay back the money — which of course they could not do. I think the part of it that people don't understand, and maybe I hope understand with the doc, is that no one, I think, expected them to be as big as they were.

Elamin: This was not the plan.

Hanif: Yeah, the plan was maybe … have a song or two. It really got away from them — in a good way for their success, but in a bad way for the whole scheme of the facade of Milli Vanilli.

Elamin: There's a real sort of propulsion to that getting away from them in the documentary…. At every step of the way, there is this sense of, "We've bought in this far. How can we not sort of buy in a little bit further?" And then there's all these moneyed interests around them that are encouraging them to stay the course even though, as you can kind of tell, it was beginning to eat away at them, in a way.

Hanif: Yeah. I think one thing that we really tried to do in the doc is lay out how big they were and how quickly it happened, because I think that's maybe a little bit hard for people to grasp today. Now, so much music comes out, and music stardom is filtered through different lenses than it was in the late '80s and early '90s. Milli Vanilli, the rise and fall happens so quickly. There is a part of it where you can sense it was getting away from even them. And then there's a part where they embraced it; you play a character, you put forth a facade for so long that you begin to embody it…. We tried to touch on that in the doc — that speed at which this happened for them almost required them to fully buy into the act. So any nervousness or anxiety they had, it had to go away because they were performing.

WATCH | Boney M. perform Rasputin at Sopot Festival 1979:

Elamin: We should also give a bit of context in terms of who the wizard behind the curtain is, because we get introduced to this character of Frank Farian. He's the producer behind Milli Vanilli. We also learn actually this idea of lip synching and putting a different face to a voice — this wasn't even the first time that Frank Farian did this. Who else did he do that with?

Hanif: Boney M. of Rasputin. It was a similar approach in terms of the racialized aspect. Bobby Farrell, Marcia Barrett and Liz Mitchell were Black, and Frank Farian is not. Frank Farian had these Black artists in front of an audience singing, and he was actually the voice behind Boney M.

Elamin: He's the one who sings Rasputin, which is wild to think about.

Hanif: So, he had done this before…. This is his M.O. I think another thing we tried to do in the documentary was touch on the racialized aspects of putting forth a Black group and stripping them of any autonomy. They were very literally machines, at the whims of a white producer.

WATCH | Milli Vanilli's backing track skips during an MTV Concert in Bristol, Connecticut:

Elamin: Let's talk about what eventually ended the imposter run. The documentary sort of has this crescendo of them accepting the Grammy onstage.

Hanif: You know what's funny is, I think if you ask people — myself included — when the unraveling happened, I remember it incorrectly. I thought Milli Vanilli's unraveling happened at the Connecticut MTV concert when the tape skipped and the lip syncing was revealed…. But they had a whole arc after that. It was the Grammy that did them in, and I think the behavior after the Grammy. Not only did they win the Grammy, but it has to be said, too, that by the time they won the Grammy, people in the music industry knew they weren't really singing. So to award them a Grammy over other people, and the way that the group began to behave after the Grammys — there was the quote about being bigger than the Beatles, these kinds of things. I think that the Grammy empowered their egos, and empowered them over Frank Farian, who did not care for the exercising of that power and decided then to pull the rug out from under them, so to speak.

Elamin: I have to say, the most difficult but also most compelling part of the documentary to me was watching Fab, who is the still alive member of Milli Vanilli, react to the Grammy win. The quote that he gives you is, "Did we deserve to win the Grammy? Some people say no." And I'm like, what people say yes, Fab?

And then he says, "But a very small part of me believes that we should have won the Grammy." This is extraordinary — in the moment where you know you didn't sing a single note, you're still like, "Yeah, but we worked really hard. We danced really well. We went through this whole thing. Maybe there's a part of me that believes we should have won the Grammy."

Hanif: I do want to say, I have so much gratitude for Fab and how candid he was, how generous he was, and the clarity with which he told the story. When he started the sentence like, "We didn't sing the song, so we don't deserve a Grammy." I was like, of course, Fab!

That part of him that says, "Yes," I understand it because one, I'm a Grammy skeptic, so at this point, who cares. But I get it. Even if the voice on the record wasn't theirs, they endured something to make those records. I don't want to take away from the folks who actually performed those songs, performed the vocals. But there was work beyond the vocalizing. Now, I would not award them a Grammy personally, but I understand the small part of Fab that says, "Yeah, there was work that went into this beyond just the singing."

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts, or on Youtube:

Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib produced by Ty Callender.