Worse than Chunk getting his ice cream taken away in Goonies, worse than every olympiad’s medal-stripped doping fiasco, there is Milli Vanilli, the cheesy pop puppets of 1990 who attained the status of the only artist to ever have their Grammy — for Best New Artist — taken away on this day in 1990, after it was revealed that the faces of the group, Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, were just that: two Munich models cherry-picked by an evil German record producer to be the image of his maniacal creation in which other actually talented vocalists were chosen to make the machine sound pretty.
We say evil because Pilatus and Morvan really got the shaft, when producer Frank Farian, orchestrator of the whole shebang, left them high and dry when the industry caught on, as awards started to get stripped, lawsuits rolled in and the world attempted to return their copies of Girl You Know It’s True to record stores, that ultimately led to the downward spiral “accidental overdose”-death of Pilatus.
So cheese aside, puppetry aside, here’s an homage to “blame,” because you “gotta blame it on something:”
Whatever you do don’t put the blame on you
Blame it on the rain, yeah, yeah
You can blame it on the rain
