Milli Vanillied

When someone tricks you into clicking on a link that takes you to Milli Vanilli's song "Girl you know it's true"

term used to describe something which false, fraudulent or not truly disclosed in some way.

The mere mention of the name still calls up the same derision it did when the dance-pop duo's career came to a sudden and ignominious end: Fakers. Frauds. A blatant marketing scam. Their story has been retold countless times: after selling millions of records, Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan were revealed to be models who publicly lip-synced to tracks recorded by anonymous studio vocalists. They became the first act ever stripped of a Grammy award and came to symbolize everything people disliked about dance-pop: it was so faceless that every musician involved could remain anonymous without anyone knowing the difference, so mechanical and artificial that the people who constructed it had to hire models to give it any human appeal, so pandering and superficial that people bought it just for its attachment to a pretty face.

Officially, Milli Vanilli was a techno-dance singing duo consisting of Rob Pilatus of Germany and Fabrice Morvan of France. They released one album in late 1988, "Girl You Know is True". From that period up to early 1990 it spawned five Top 10 hits - the title track, the #1 "Don't Forget My Number", the #1 "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You", the #1 "Blame It On the Rain" and entering the new decade with "All or Nothing". In early 1990, they were caught lip-synching "Blame It On the Rain" live on TV during a music awards show. The previous year the tape skipped during a "concert" that also revealed the duo's lip-synching. Allegations flew. Later in the year the duo said they wanted to do some real singing on their next album. They revealed to a music employee that all they did for the record was pose for the album cover and have the project credited to them under the name "Milli Vanilli". The shit really hit the fan after that. The duo's album sold multi-platinum but was soon deleted. They had to return their Grammy for Best New Group, the first time that ever happened. Milli Vanilli was disgraced in what is possibly the biggest sham in music history. Still, they were used in a Pepsi TV ad the following year, lip-synching to an opera record. A year later, they released an album under their real names, supposedly the vocals were the duo's own. It sank like a stone in a pond. Pilatus commited suicide in 1998. Fabrice is still living. The term "Milli Vanilli" now is used to denote fraud and fakery.

Was a singing group that didn't sing, but lipsynched.

Now, it can be an insult to someone's singing abilities, or
if something is called "milli vanilli" its reffered to as fake.

Once a singing group in the late 80s that didn't sing but lipsinked instead, MILLI VANILLI is now used as an adjective to describe something that is fake.

A band in the 80's that was caught lip synking. They had 4 hit songs and they were not very good.