The Kitchen Sync
In one of those web-wanderings I'm not even going to try to explain, I wound up reading the history of Milli Vanilli on wikipedia. Yeah, those guys — the lip sync ones.
It's funny that I'd completely forgotten that this band, before that whole big scandal, had a sextuple platinum single. I don't know exactly how many pop acts have hit that mark, but it's definitely not a lot. And then they plummeted from there to "that crappy pop band" status practically overnight.
At any rate, it occurred to me as I read the article that around 1990 I had scarcely any knowledge of what those guys really looked like. About the only music videos I watched in high school were on Post Modern MTV, where I'd get my nightly fill of New Order and Morrissey — not many dredlocked pop idols hanging around there. So when the lip syncing scandal broke, my thoughts mostly consisted of, "So?"
If someone had told me that Bernard Sumner wasn't actually fronting New Order, I might have told you that it seems that if they'd been hand-picking vocalists, they at least could have found someone a little less nasal, but I still liked the music itself pretty well. No major harm done. But for a Top 40 star, apparently this meant instant death. "Oh my God, you mean, they don't actually look like that? Then what about the poster on my wall?!? It's all a lie! A lie I tell you!" Does this really make any sense?
Even more telling was the warning label subsequently affixed to Milli Vanilli records, which objectively claimed that the music on the record was actually the work of John Davis, Brad Howell, and Charles Shaw. Cool, to give credit where credit was due. But judging from consumer response, the label actually said, "The recordings on this record were not made by two buff dred-locked, perfect-skinned pop idols, and therefore may have actually sucked all along. Listen with caution."
By summarily destroying these guys' career, pop music finally confessed the motto which people had accused it of for decades: Pop music — Our identity is our look, not our sound.
It's funny that I'd completely forgotten that this band, before that whole big scandal, had a sextuple platinum single. I don't know exactly how many pop acts have hit that mark, but it's definitely not a lot. And then they plummeted from there to "that crappy pop band" status practically overnight.
At any rate, it occurred to me as I read the article that around 1990 I had scarcely any knowledge of what those guys really looked like. About the only music videos I watched in high school were on Post Modern MTV, where I'd get my nightly fill of New Order and Morrissey — not many dredlocked pop idols hanging around there. So when the lip syncing scandal broke, my thoughts mostly consisted of, "So?"
If someone had told me that Bernard Sumner wasn't actually fronting New Order, I might have told you that it seems that if they'd been hand-picking vocalists, they at least could have found someone a little less nasal, but I still liked the music itself pretty well. No major harm done. But for a Top 40 star, apparently this meant instant death. "Oh my God, you mean, they don't actually look like that? Then what about the poster on my wall?!? It's all a lie! A lie I tell you!" Does this really make any sense?
Even more telling was the warning label subsequently affixed to Milli Vanilli records, which objectively claimed that the music on the record was actually the work of John Davis, Brad Howell, and Charles Shaw. Cool, to give credit where credit was due. But judging from consumer response, the label actually said, "The recordings on this record were not made by two buff dred-locked, perfect-skinned pop idols, and therefore may have actually sucked all along. Listen with caution."
By summarily destroying these guys' career, pop music finally confessed the motto which people had accused it of for decades: Pop music — Our identity is our look, not our sound.