{"id":1104,"date":"2026-07-27T12:36:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T12:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1104"},"modified":"2026-07-27T12:36:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T12:36:18","slug":"fab-morvan-takes-back-his-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1104","title":{"rendered":"Fab Morvan Takes Back His Voice"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<p>Sitting on a bench in Central Park on a recent summer day, Fabrice Morvan, the surviving member of Milli Vanilli, was contemplating his future. \u201cIt\u2019s wide open,\u201d he said, gesturing toward a ball field in front of him.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1102\">Take Me Out to the Brainball Game<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s \u2018Monsters,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Morvan went on, referring to the recent Netflix drama about the Menendez brothers, which featured the Milli Vanilli hits \u201cGirl You Know It\u2019s True\u201d and \u201cBlame It on the Rain.\u201d \u201cThanks to \u2018Monsters,\u2019 those songs, among others, went to the top of the charts again worldwide.\u201d The show, he explained, had introduced the music to a younger audience, which was unaware of, or unconcerned by, the thirty-six-year-old lip-synching scandal that plagued the band.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>Morvan, who lives in Amsterdam with his Dutch partner, Tessa Van Der Steen, and their four children, is performing in the United States this summer, as part of the \u201cI Love the Nineties\u201d tour. He has not toured the country since the fall of 1990, when it was revealed that he and Rob Pilatus, the other half of the pop duo, were not, in fact, the singers on Milli Vanilli\u2019s recordings. The German producer Frank Farian, who masterminded the scheme, had instead used the voices of five session singers\u2014Brad Howell, Charles Shaw, John Davis, and the sisters Jodie and Linda Rocco. Farian had made a Faustian bargain with Rob and Fab, who were young, impoverished Black dancers, from Munich and Paris, respectively: <em>I will make you famous, if you will maintain the lie.<\/em> The lads reluctantly agreed to play along by lip-synching at their live performances. The secret might have been kept (Farian had pulled off a similar stunt in the seventies, with the Euro-disco group Boney\u00a0M.) if Milli Vanilli hadn\u2019t won the Grammy for Best New Artist, in March, 1990. When, in a Pygmalion-esque plot twist, the real singers threatened to go public, Farian admitted the truth, in a press conference in New York. Milli Vanilli\u2019s Grammy was revoked.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe went from being kings to being laughingstocks,\u201d Morvan said, crossing his legs on the bench to reveal socks with a \u201cStar Wars\u201d motif, worn with black Vans. His famous long hair was piled on top of his head. For years, the scandal had followed him, \u201clike it was my shadow,\u201d he said. \u201cI cut my hair off. Everywhere I went, I didn\u2019t know if people were smiling or smirking.\u201d He called it \u201cludicrous\u201d that he and Pilatus were blamed for the deception, while Farian and Arista, the group\u2019s label (headed by Clive Davis, who recently died), walked away with millions of dollars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<p>Arista claimed to have been fooled by Farian, but did the executives know? \u201cThey knew everything that was going on,\u201d Morvan said.<\/p>\n<p>After Pilatus died, of a drug overdose, in 1998, Morvan said, \u201cI resolved to work on myself and write songs and learn how to play guitar.\u201d He also worked on his singing. The day before his visit to the park, he had performed on \u201cGood Day New York\u201d and again on \u201cGood Night New York,\u201d and he sounded almost as good as the fake him.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1100\">Get Yer Statue of Liberty Here!<\/a><\/p>\n<p>In recent years, the Milli Vanilli story has been retold in no fewer than three feature films: Luke Korem\u2019s 2023 documentary, \u201cMilli Vanilli\u201d; Simon Verhoeven\u2019s 2024 bio-pic, \u201cGirl You Know It\u2019s True,\u201d and a new documentary, \u201cSurviving a Scandal,\u201d coming to Hulu in January. Morvan tells his version in his forthcoming memoir, \u201cBlame It on the Game\u201d; his narration for the audiobook was nominated for a Grammy. In these revisionist narratives, Rob and Fab are victims of the connivers who concocted the scheme. \u201cThey\u2019re still making money off my back, because they\u2019re using my likeness,\u201d Morvan said. He gets nothing from the songs.<\/p>\n<p>Korem\u2019s doc was tested on a focus group of Gen Z-ers, for whom lip-synching is the lingua franca on TikTok. \u201cThe response was \u2018O.K., so what did they do wrong?\u2019\u00a0\u201d Morvan said. Maybe Rob and Fab were deepfake pioneers? \u201cTrailblazers,\u201d he allowed, \u201cin a way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Morvan was supposed to have performed as Milli Vanilli at Donald Trump\u2019s sixteen-day Great American State Fair. (Before Farian died, in 2024, he gave Morvan permission to use the name.) His reasoning, he said, was \u201cThere\u2019s going to be Vanilli fans there. Let\u2019s celebrate the fact that I\u2019m still here and they\u2019re still here.\u201d Eventually, like many other artists on the bill, Morvan decided to cancel. But earlier, when a flyer for the concert series went out, one of the original session singers issued a statement: \u201cOthers using the name \u2018Milli Vanilli\u2019 that appear on the advertisement should be considered a tribute band with no association vocally or musically to our sound or songs.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHow ridiculous,\u201d Morvan said, outraged at being dismissed as a counterfeit version of a famously inauthentic group. \u201cThey\u2019re background singers!\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1098\">John Leguizamo Is a Noble Fellow<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Decades after Milli Vanilli\u2019s lip-synching scandal, the singer is still reclaiming his legacy\u2014with a documentary, an EP, and an almost-performance at Trump\u2019s state fair. John Seabrook writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-deepfake-dept"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Fab Morvan Takes Back His Voice - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1104\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fab Morvan Takes Back His Voice - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Decades after Milli Vanilli\u2019s lip-synching scandal, the singer is still reclaiming his legacy\u2014with a documentary, an EP, and an almost-performance at Trump\u2019s state fair. 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