round 2
(4) Milli Vanilli, “Don’t Forget My Number”
ICED
(12) FOREIGNER, “HOT BLOODED”
137-105
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 14.
AMORAK HUEY ON “BABY DON’T FORGET MY NUMBER”
Of course everything about the Milli Vanilli story feels scripted.
But where do you start the movie?
Perhaps it depends on what you want the message to be, what you think the point of it is, but that’s the problem. Trying to find a message. A theme. A moral of the story, beyond “This thing happened, and it’s kind of funny, a pop culture punchline, but it’s also incredibly tragic, so we don’t want to make too much fun of it.”
No wonder they haven’t made the movie yet, despite it seeming to be a natural fit, despite the movie being long rumored, despite the fact that nearly everything written about Milli Vanilli in the past two decades mentions the possibility of a movie, the appropriateness of a movie, the inevitability of a movie.
The Milli Vanilli saga is all story and no plot, in the E.M. Forster sense of the terms: the king died and the queen died—that’s a story. The king died and then the queen died of grief—that’s a plot. The story here is simple: the duo lip-synced and the duo got caught. The plot? That’s more difficult to pin down, though there surely is plenty of grief in it.
SCENE: BRISTOL, CONNECTICUT, JULY 1989
This moment is the encapsulation of the Milli Vanilli fraud, the physical embodiment of things ripping apart at the seams, a star falling from the sky in real time. It would be a fine place to start the movie.
On stage at a Connecticut theme park, as part of the Club MTV Tour. Cameras everywhere. The red-hot pop duo Milli Vanilli, Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, a ridiculously good-looking pair rocking hair extensions and tank tops and bicycle shorts that highlight their muscular thighs and crotch bulges, play their hit song “Girl You Know It’s True.” Lights are flashing. Thousands of fans dance and scream and sing along.
Then something goes wrong with the sound system. The song catches, then sticks. The title repeats. Over and over. It’s agonizing.
“Girl you know it’s—”
“Girl you know it’s—”
“Girl you know it’s—”
“Girl you know it’s—”
They duo gamely tries to cover, but the track continues to skip. Rob gives it a few head pumps before giving up and rushing off the stage, his head down, his thigh muscles gleaming. “I wanted to die,” he says.
In case you’ve forgotten the details, here’s the deal with Milli Vanilli, the essence of the scandal: they did not sing their own songs. They weren’t merely lip-syncing this one live performance, they were always lip-syncing. The voices on their hit songs belonged to someone else. One of the biggest hoaxes in music history, and here it was, the truth coming out live on MTV. Yes, it seems scripted. Made up for the movie. But it really happened. You can watch it here:
How dramatic, right? It’s the curtain rising to reveal the man in the corner pulling the levers. It’s Shaggy and Scooby pulling the mask off the monster to reveal it’s been the museum curator all along. The dramatic ending of a scam. Only it isn’t. It’s only in hindsight that this scene takes on such weight. At the time? MTV’s Downtown Julie Brown runs after Rob and shoves him back onto the stage. Some technician fixes the sound system. And the show goes on, for another year and a half.
SCENE: WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, NOVEMBER 1991
The Mondrian Hotel, overlooking Sunset Boulevard. A balcony. A railing nine floors up. The vertigo of looking down from such a height.
Rob Pilatus—who said he wanted to die back there in Bristol—strung out and desperate, thinking of climbing onto the railing. Maybe actually climbing partway onto it. Thinking of jumping. But the phone rings in the room behind him. He goes in to answer it. Deputies rush in and grab him, drive him to Cedars-Sinai for rehab and observation.
Because Milli Vanilli’s credibility is utterly shot at this point, people aren’t sure how to feel about the news of Rob’s suicidal behavior. Is it just another hoax? An attempt to win back public sympathy? That’s beside the point, though. There’s no doubt he is a desperate man, and no wonder.
The Bristol event didn’t expose Milli Vanilli to the general public, despite happening in front of thousands of fans and live on MTV. For one thing, this is before every fan in attendance has a phone to capture the moment, before social media and viral videos and instant TikTok parodies. For another thing, lots of acts lip-sync their live performances, or parts of them. But what happens on that stage leads to people talking behind the scenes; it raises suspicion in the music business and music journalism. People are starting to notice the extreme difference between the duo’s singing voices and their accents during interviews.
Plus, Rob and Fab themselves are getting tired of it. Understandably. It’s not easy to carry the weight of such a monumental lie, much less to do it so publicly, much less when you feel you are being cheated out of something you deserve. They came into this whole thing thinking of themselves as singers, after all. So in November of 1991, they demand to be allowed to sing on the next album. Their producer fires them. Rob gives an interview to the Los Angeles Times in which he fesses up to the scheme. And the whole thing comes crashing down. There will be no next album. The Grammy for best new artist is revoked. “We sold our soul to the devil,” the duo declares at a press conference where they come clean to the world.
SCENE: MUNICH, GERMANY, NEW YEAR’S DAY 1988
A small recording studio. Two good-looking guys—and I mean, really good-looking, like being too close to them makes you uncomfortable—are fumbling their way through an audition. The song, naturally: “Girl You Know It’s True.”
The guys are … well, they’re not doing great. They are fucking handsome, though.
And there’s a studio guy. A producer. Frank Farian, a name that like everything else in this story, sounds like I made it up (actually, he made it up; his real name is Franz Reuther). He looks pretty much exactly like a 1980s studio guy: wavy hair, small eyes, good tan, ostentatiously white teeth in a wide grin, which is to say that if you start the movie with this scene, it will be obvious to everyone who the villain is going to turn out to be.
Rob and Fab have been trying to make a go of it as a pop duo in Germany. They have some songs, though pretty much no one has heard them. They want to be stars. And here’s this guy—Frank Farian—who wants to make them stars. He’s also offering them money, which they very much need. Farian has a check for them, and a contract, and an idea. Time is of the essence, he insists, they need to get this video filmed and do so some shows, we’ll worry about the vocals later. Who has time for fine print when your dreams are being dangled in front of you? When you’re hungry and someone has food?
The thing about selling your soul to the devil is that it’s easy to insist you’d never do it, but even easier to actually do it when the devil offers you everything you’ve ever wanted.
MONTAGE: 1988-90, ALL OVER THE WORLD
What’s crazy is that Farian’s idea works. And it works better than anyone could have realistically hoped.
“Girl You Know It’s True” is a hit, first in Germany, then across Europe, and eventually in North America. Rob and Fab are stars, in a hurry, with all the trappings of stardom. Hotel-room parties and adoring crowds. Munich. Berlin. London. New York. Arista Records signs them—well, signs Farian, who owns Milli Vanilli. They meet Clive Davis. They are on the same label as Whitney Houston. Rob and Fab keep asking about when they’ll get to sing their own songs. Farian keeps saying yeah, yeah, we’ll talk about it, later, later. Things get bigger and bigger. Their album sells 7 million copies in the United States, 14 million copies worldwide. All four of their singles climb toward the top of the charts. They win a Grammy for Best New Artist. Weird Al parodies their hits:
Lots of people are making lots of money. Milli Vanilli is a bona fide phenomenon. It’s more than anyone could have hoped for. The duo are on top of the world, but they’re not happy. So naturally, this montage includes alcohol. Cocaine. Lots of passing out quietly in empty hotel rooms at the end of another whirlwind day. A gulf widens between who Rob and Fab are and who they appear to be, who they are paid to be.
SCENE: SOMEWHERE IN EUROPE, THE 1960s & ’70s
The other crazy thing about Farian’s idea is that he has done it before.
Here’s a scene for you: a young Frank Farian, walking out of the restaurant where he cooks, chasing his dream of being a singer, of being a star. You can see it: he throws an apron in the trash bin as he heads out the door.
But it doesn’t work. He records some songs, but has little success. So he makes a new plan. He records and releases the song “Baby Do You Wanna Bump” under the name Boney M. Then he hires singers and dancers to form a pop-disco group of the same name. Someone else becomes the front man for concerts and videos, but Farian himself does the vocals for all the group’s albums.
People eventually figure out that the supposed front man isn’t actually singing, but no one really cares. Maybe because it’s disco. Maybe because although Boney M is popular, they never reach the heights of Milli Vanilli. At any rate, Farian has his blueprint.
SCENE: INTERVIEW ROOM, 2017
An older, wiser, sadder Fab, being interviewed on YouTube. It has been decades since that recording studio in Munich, since the disaster in Bristol, since the press conference in Los Angeles. Rob is gone. He dies in 1998 of an accidental drug and alcohol overdose, while the duo are preparing to go on tour to support a new Milli Vanilli album. The album is never released.
The interviewer is trying to make sense of the story, trying to get Fab to offer some new insight, but there’s not much sense to be found in any of it. What’s clear, however, is that the stretch from January 1988 to November 1991 is somehow irrevocable. There’s no coming back from what happened in those two-plus years. The heights were too high, things went too far.
Milli Vanilli tried to come back, certainly. After Rob came in from that balcony and went through rehab, the duo recorded an album with their own voices under the name Rob ‘n Fab. They put a brave face on things, tried to own their new images, tried to be self-deprecating about the scandal:
None of it worked. Their album flopped, selling only about 2,000 copies. Rob sank back into depression and drugs. He spent time in jail; Fab bailed him out. It didn’t matter.
Talking about it all now, Fab is wry, self-deprecating, but also, you can see, still angry, still wounded. He looks tired. You can see that he has spent his entire life talking about these same events. He’s told the story a hundred times, a thousand times. He will always be telling the story. It has taken a toll. He remains almost impossible handsome.
SCENE: GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN, FEBRUARY 2020
This is the Adaptation approach to the story. An essayist, played perhaps by Nicolas Cage because why not, sits at a dining room table, pecking at a laptop, listening to “Baby Don’t Forget My Number” on repeat, hoping to find meaning in it and failing.
The song itself? The song this essay was commissioned about? It’s nothing. A trifling. A throwaway bit of late-1980s commercial pop nonsense. Deliberately, calculatingly positioned to take advantage of the rising popularity of hip-hop, it is so clearly the creation of a hitmaker, a producer who sees the path to making money. This is not a song written by a human being with some artistic vision, some story to tell.
Released in December 1988, “Baby Don’t Forget My Number” was the duo’s second single and first of three No. 1 hits. It ended 1989 at No. 28 on the Hot 100 Billboard chart, right between Breathe’s “How Can I Fall?” and Martika’s “Toy Soldiers,” and behind all three of Milli Vanilli’s other songs from that year. It’s nowhere near as good as “Blame It on the Rain,” nor as iconic as “Girl You Know It’s True.” It is a difficult song to listen to all the way though, much less on repeat. It’s easy to imagine the Nicolas Cage-portrayed writer growing increasingly frazzled, his hair increasingly wild, his desire to finish the essay increasingly urgent.
The lyrics are vague to the point of nonsense, both grammatically and metaphorically: “I see it so clearly that our love it’s so strong,” and then, “Baby love is stronger than thunder.” (A line one lyrics site transcribes as “don’t be stronger than a thunder,” which is only slightly more confusing.) The gist, I suppose, is that a true love can withstand a misplaced phone number, or at least that’s the story I gather from the video, in which a chance encounter leads to the gift of a phone number, but then the paper bearing that number blows out the window, where it is stepped on by a passerby who gets into a cab with the number stuck to his shoe, so Rob and Fab pursue him on bicycles, all while the woman whose number it is waits forlornly by her phone, flipping channels, and every station is tauntingly showing black and white footage of people and apes and cartoon characters on the phone. Whew. It’s a lot. There’s also a lot of footage of the duo dancing, all lip-sync and shoulder pads, on what looks like a stage that has been set for an elementary school variety show, with an industrial city skyline and … a moat? That Rob and Fab emerge from in some kind of weird birthing image? The Nicolas Cage character in my movie has no idea what to say.
But here’s the thing about the Milli Vanilli movie: it’s probably too late to make it. It’s hard to imagine convincing 2020 audiences that this is a scandal worth caring about. It feels downright quaint in this current moment. The other reason you can’t make this movie is that all of the endings suck. At the end of the video for “Baby Don’t Forget My Number,” the pair finally chase down the passerby only to find that the number is no longer attached to his shoe. But plot twist! Their quest for number (searching high high high and searching low low low) has led them right to the woman’s building, and they run into her just as she’s emerging, having given up on waiting for that phone call. In the real life Milli Vanilli story, though, there are no happy twists at the end. Rob comes in from that balcony and gets help, but he dies anyway. Rob and Fab record their album, singing for real this time, but it is terrible and no one buys it. The guys who did the vocals for Milli Vanilli, Brad Howell and John Davis, try the same thing, recording an album titled The Real Milli Vanilli, but it is also terrible and no one buys it. Fab insists they were talented singers and Farian took away their dreams, but it doesn’t look like even he entirely believes his own words.
Probably the place to end the movie is where we started, back on that stage in Connecticut, right before the song glitches. Sure, nothing is real, and the deal with the devil has already been struck, and the devil will always come for the part in the fine print, but at that moment at least everyone can still pretend they believe in what’s happening. The end is coming. It’s closer than anyone realizes. But for now, the spotlights are on, and the cameras are rolling, and the music is loud, and everyone is having the time of their lives.
Amorak Huey (pictured in November 1991, the same month as Milli Vanilli’s confessional press conference) is author of the poetry collections Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress, forthcoming in 2021), Boom Box (Sundress, 2019), Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank, 2018), and Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015), as well as two chapbooks. A 2017 NEA Fellowship recipient, he is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
AMY ROSSI ON “HOT BLOODED”
INTRODUCTION
When I was a teenager, an older friend once said half-jokingly, “You have such good taste in books and movies. How can your taste in music be this bad?”
How do you respond to that when you are maybe sixteen, and it’s true that you read well-regarded books and call movies “films” and also feel so seen when you listen to sex-drenched classic rock and glam metal that has nothing to do with your life as lived thus far? “Guilty as charged!”?
It wasn’t the first time I’d been informed my taste in music was bad, nor the last. In the nearly 20 years since, I’ve embraced the fact that the Venn diagram of music that’s considered bad and music that I love without inhibition is nearly a circle.
I take my pleasure without guilt. You could say I’ve been training for this my entire life.
So maybe “Hot Blooded” is bad in your estimation. And that’s fair. In the words of one W. Axl Rose, everybody warms themselves to a different fire. But, so often when a song is dismissed as “bad,” what that really means is that it’s too much—too committed to its concept, too earnest, too open, too detached from any sense of irony, too unconcerned with the listener’s comfort.
What I’m saying is, if a whole-hearted celebration of the single entendre, enthusiastic consent, and making good choices that also includes SPIES is bad, what even is good?
*record scratch*
“I’m sorry, spies?” you might be saying.
Yes. Spies. We’ll get there, but we have to start at the beginning. There is an ethos to “Hot Blooded,” in all its too-much glory, and it is only through this ethos that you can get to the spies.
THE VERSE / THE CHORUS
You don't have to read my mind to know what I have in mind.
Honey, you oughta know.
Now you move so fine, let me lay it on the line:
I wanna know what you're doin’ after the show.
First of all, this is refreshing as all outdoors. How many times have you been kind of flirting with someone, but you’re not sure if they’re flirting back? It’s exhausting! So let’s appreciate the fact that our narrator is transparent enough to ensure there will be nary a lick of mind-reading involved when it comes to conversing with him. No cards to hold back here. He would rather lay on the line and ask the woman he’s interested in what she is doing after his concert than play it cool.
Now it’s up to you, we can make a secret rendezvous,
Just me and you, I'll show you lovin’ like you never knew.
Let’s repeat it for the people in the back: it is up to you. Is he going to make his case? Well, yes. Several times. He wants to be sure she’s clear on his offer. But once he outlines that plan, he is placing the ball in her court because it takes two enthusiastic partners to rendezvous. He doesn’t declare that she’s his or that she should be his or that he’s going to make her his. There’s no language of possession. And one gets the sense that if she says no, he’ll pay her a final compliment and find another girl who is also moving pretty fine.
I’m hot blooded, check it and see.
I got a fever of a hundred and three.
Come on baby, do you do more than dance?
I’m hot blooded, hot blooded.
What makes “Hot Blooded” such a joyful song is that the actual temperature of the narrator’s blood is literally the only metaphor in the entire thing. And honestly, it might not even be all that metaphorical because a) he’s been under stage lights and probably does feel quite warm and b) he’s also a little bit high, as he informs us at the very end, so his perception of his blood heat could be off.
“Do you do more than dance” isn’t like, a great come-on, I know, but also I appreciate the narrator’s acknowledgment that sometimes a person just wants to hang out in the front row and dance their way through a show, and if there are a few hip swivels and gyrations therein, it is not necessarily for anything but the music and to assume that it’s about him is not okay.
(METAPHORICAL) BRIDGE: A NOTE ON BADNESS
I saw Foreigner in July 2018, the headlining act of a bill that included Whitesnake and Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin evening. It was as ridiculously incredible as it sounds: outside in a North Carolina heat wave, questionable frozen margaritas sipped from plastic palm trees, and a local choir participating in “I Want to Know What Love Is.” Also, I would later end up recognizing Whitesnake’s guitarist playing at a Cher concert.
About a year before I ever saw actual Foreigner, though, I saw a local all-woman Foreigner cover band. It had been a dark news week, the kind that can make you not want to be a woman alone in public, and I went back and forth over whether or not it made sense to go, if I was up for being in a dark, boozy, crowded venue by myself, or if that would be asking for trouble. But I knew I needed it. I needed to take up space and dance and feel the loudness, be the loudness. Be too much.
The women on stage sunk into the wonderful ’70s/’80s cheese. They made it their own. They wore amazing vests. And when they sang “Jukebox Hero” about a young woman instead of a young man, I got a little wet-eyed.
What I’m saying is: one person’s badness is another person’s moment of grace.
THE VERSE / THE CHORUS, CONTINUED
If it feels all right, maybe you can stay all night.
Shall I leave you my key?
But you've got to give me a sign, come on, girl, some kind of sign.
Tell me, are you hot, mama? You sure look that way to me.”
Just in case we were not 100% clear that sexual activities are on our narrator’s mind, he is once again laying it on the line—if she’s into it. If she wants to stay, that’d be awesome. No need to decide right now, and if it ends up not feeling all right later, understood. Plus, he’s not leaving that key unless she gives him a sign that that’s a thing she actually wants. And while she looks hot to him, he knows looks alone don’t mean anything.
Are you old enough? Will you be ready when I call your bluff?
Is my timing right? Did you save your love for me tonight?
Okay, I know, but how many cringe-inducing tales of 1970s rock star excess and outright criminality have you read or watched in a VH1 rock doc that concluded with, “Yeah but it was the ’70s, it was a different time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” either plainly stated or implied?
It wasn’t that different.
This walking hormone knew well enough in 1978 to check that the young woman he was hitting on was of age before continuing on to confirm that she would enthusiastically want to accompany him to his hotel room.
And also he recognizes that she could be over 18 and find him attractive, but the timing might not be good and she just might not be feeling it. The bar is low, and our narrator is stepping over it with aplomb.
Now it's up to you, can we make a secret rendezvous?
Oh, before we do, you'll have to get away from you-know-who
Here it is.
Once again, this is a song with half a metaphor at most. We have a narrator who openly states that one does not have to read his mind to know what he is thinking of. Which is sex. Single entendres are his maximum threshold. He asks her if she is old enough. He is flashing hotel keys. In sum: he is not subtle. This is an actual ode to not being subtle.
If the woman in question was attending this concert with a boyfriend or other love interest, or even a parent or guardian, nothing in the previous verses suggests our narrator would not acknowledge it outright. Consider the fact that the line could easily be, “Before we do, you’ll have to tell him you found someone new.” It scans.
Ergo: she’s dodging spies.
It’s right there in the text. I don’t make the rules, I just report on them.
CODA
I didn’t disagree with the friend who marveled at the depths of my bad musical taste years ago, but I do now, in that I’m not sure I have good taste in any kind of pop culture anymore, and what’s more, I don’t care. I am just not cool, and not in the way cool people say they aren’t cool. I am a messy sort of uncool, wanting too hard and feeling too big, and it has taken me a really long time to not just acknowledge my uncoolness—my badness—but to realize that it’s fine.
The thing is, I love wearing earnest glitter and snakeskin and my tee shirt that says Go to Bed with Motörhead, and I love singing along, not well, to Foreigner and Warrant and Culture Club and so many other bands deemed too over-the-top to take seriously, because I’m hot-blooded, okay, check it and see, because the times I feel the most myself in this world are when I don’t think to worry about being too much, because there is joy in being cheesy, joy in embracing my own tackiness.
There is joy in laying it on the line instead wondering if someone will bother reading around it.
Amy Rossi lives, writes, and attends every Badness-adjacent concert possible in North Carolina. Find out more at amyrossi.com.