the first round
(4) Milli Vanilli, Don’t Forget My Number
MUFFLED
(13) Chuck Mangione, Feels So Good
191-47
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND
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 9
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.
manuel muñoz on “feels so good”
Let’s start with the theme to Miami Vice, shall we? Did you know the intro to this TV show somehow hit the very top of the Billboard charts in 1985? Well, now you do. And I point this out not to shoehorn Jan Hammer into this conversation as a late-breaking crown-snatcher for Badness, but to remind everyone that instrumental pop has a sneaky way of exposing our absolute pleasure in shitty music. More than that—and for GenXers especially—it reveals how much we are susceptible to the allure of an easily identifiable melody. I say without a bit of shame that one of the rare trivia questions I ever answered first for my group involved knowing instantly the theme to Knots Landing. (The other involved knowing all the actresses who ever won an Oscar playing a hooker, with or without a heart of gold, when I held my palm out to my teammates and said, “Just give me the paper.” But now I’m bragging, and not even humbly.)
We’re primed to the suggestibility of an instrumental. The Miami Vice theme song is all neon cocaine, those two women coming out of a restaurant in bikinis because that’s the life you were meant to envy if you were watching on a Friday night in Fresno with a chin in your hand. I thank God it’s a novelty act and not in this bracket. Kenny G’s “Songbird,” lurking on the other side of the draw, worries me as a formidable opponent because it arrived at the height of VH1, lacing itself underneath soap opera seductions and US Olympic short-skating programs. It has a video—and one must never underestimate the power of a visual aid. But the original beast that spawned these horrors is Chuck Mangione’s 1977 “Feels So Good,” a song so bad that even its title feels like it’s trolling the fuck out of you, and it spread its Badness on sound alone.
“Feels So Good” offers two dead giveaways to its Badness. The first is that it has more than one version, the classic sign of an artist overestimating the importance of their achievement. Admittedly, one is the radio edit, which had to clock in at an airplay-friendly three and a half minutes or so. Certainly more than enough exposure for people to have had the good sense to know that a flugelhorn with a slight disco inflection was not going to age well. (But then again, disco got everybody: for every bit of genius like Diana Ross’s “Love Hangover,” there’s an Esther Phillips’s “Unforgettable”—and boy she wasn’t kidding.) The second version is the album cut: as title and opening track of Mangione’s album, “Feels So Good” runs nearly ten minutes long, isolating that mournful flugelhorn to a kind of movie soundtrack/opening solo that my long-ago kinda-shitty Manhattan self would have picked for the guy I had to send back to Jersey at 4:30 in the morning. Worse yet, a third version exists—one with lyrics!—and recorded four years later for the album 70 Miles Young. Ander didn’t believe me when I told him that the paper sleeve for the Feels So Good album has lyrics for this monstrosity (yes, girl—I listened to this whole album on vinyl as a kind of sense-memory immersion, and I won’t shame-name the friend who owns it). As lyrics go, they’re innocuous and sappy, just what you’d expect for a song like this, and they unsurprisingly identify “Feels So Good” as a love song. “Feels so good when I’m with you / I can’t believe you love me too.” Yet this third version, sung by one Don Potter, omits one of the worst original lyrics: “I’ll trade my baseball cards for you / Now I believe that dreams come true.” I mean...can we stop the bracket right here?
That brings me to the second dead giveaway: attempted redemption through camp. I know plenty of my friends believe that the best way to save your own ass after you’ve shown it is to get in on the joke and lead the laughter. But I’m deeply suspicious of that move. It suggests the offender knew how bad everything was to begin with and is now trying to double-dip by celebrating both everyone’s collective failure in the moment and their sudden immunity to bad taste. This is nonsense. This is deflection. This is finding out someone shat in the tub at the Fire Island house and then tried to make it a colossal joke rather than the cry for help it truly was. This is the whole cast of The Facts of Life Reunion TV movie giving you notes on your acting choices. No Magnum P.I. cameo or King of the Hill appearance will ever erase what was inflicted on the public by this song, in all in its interminable manifestations.
It takes me back to the first time I ever was fully aware of it as a song I couldn’t get away from: Christmas-time, early aughts, a party in the Bronx that finally ended by all of us getting kicked out at three in the morning. I shared a car back to the city with two guys who tried to lure me into a three-way, but I liked only one of them and I knew I was too drunk to be tactful about it. They left me off at Lincoln Center and I stumbled my way home, clutching my keys to make sure I didn’t lose them, and when I opened my eyes, it was one of those gray days when I knew the sun was never going to come out. It was already well past noon. The radio had clicked on to the oldies station at seven in the morning but I had been too bombed to hear it. When I opened my eyes in my tiny ten-by-seven foot living room, sprawled on the couch and spiraling, it was this goddamn song on the radio. It’ll be over soon, I told myself, but it kept going and going. And in that state, as we all know, we just want some things to be over. I was too hungover to get up and quiet this song, banish it. “Feels So Good” played on and on, cheery in reminding me of my terrible choices, letting me know that this was the song I could be hearing down at the Amish Market around the corner, choosing an overpriced pineapple if I had just lived right. I could be in some restaurant in Santa Monica with Mindy Cohn, this song piped overhead as she told me all about that reunion movie. This song was relentless in its urge to tell how me good I could be feeling. I couldn’t turn it off. This was the song that was going to break me. This was the song that was going to start the fire.
Manuel Muñoz has loved Chuck Mangione since he was a li’l sprout. He hopes one day to meet his hero.