Touche, Milli Vanilli ... Touche

So the Grammy awards were last night. I'll be honest, I didn't watch. While I would have liked to catch the show, I had other things going on. From what I understand, though, it was quite the evening for breaking records! Beyonce winning more awards than any other female artist (6 total), and Taylor Swift being the youngest artist ever to take "Album of the Year."

Side Bar: I've seen some hating on Taylor Swift and I think it should be brought to EVERYONE'S attention that she is a mere twenty years old, writes her own stuff, sings her own stuff, and essentially serves as production manager for her live shows. She comes up with the concepts and designs the sets. She's dedicated to her craft and, whether or not you like her music, there aren't a whole lot of young women in the business with their heads screwed on straight. She doesn't go out drinking and partying and doing stupid sh*t. And when you're in the music industry and can manage to be young and stay grounded, then I think that deserves a Grammy of its own. "And the winner of the 'Kept-My-Sh*t-Together-All-Year-AND-Managed-to-Wear-Underwear-in-All-Paparazzi-Shots' goes to ..." Personally, I could take her music or leave it, but props to Taylor for being a decent role model.

Back to the title of this post. It has been 20 years since Milli Vanilli won their "Best New Artist" Grammy, and then subsequently had to return it as they didn't actually sing anything. Great article here with Fab Morvan (not sure if he's Milli or Vanilli - one of them died of a drug overdose, sadly), about how he's had to deal with the ups and downs since then. And more importantly, the changes in the industry and the music.

In the current music industry, it is very well known that a great deal of artists lip sync on stage. Presumably this is accepted because these artists actually sing in the studio. However, that's not always the case either.

There's this fancy gadget called "Auto Tune," which is an electronic program that runs an artist's voice through some systems to get everything, well, spot on. (We're not talking about that gimicky vocal thing they used to make "Believe" by Cher sound cool, we're talking about a tool that essentially makes your voice NOT your voice.)

What does the use of this "Auto Tune" thing really mean? Example: Paris Hilton put out an album a few years back. If Paris Hilton had a concert and tried to rock it sans Lip Syncing, men, women, children, and purse chihuahuas would run screaming for the hills. Because ... She. Can't. Actually. Sing. The "Auto Tune" and other audio programs took her voice and changed it. So that's not really Paris Hilton's voice on her album (although, she did provide the initial product). Producers took the base product and fixed it.

Also, I would like point out that, in the C&C Music Factory video for "Everybody Dance Now," the actual female vocalist was replaced in the video by a thinner, prettier version because the actual vocalist wasn't really seen as sellable - a little too hefty. And that's kind of what happened to Milli Vanilli. They looked better (at the time) than the real vocalists on those tracks. So some producer pulled them off the street, put them on the cover of an album, and let it ride.

Milli Vanilli could have taken a lot of other people down with them, but they didn't. Certainly they have a good amount of blame to share in the whole scandal, but there were others who they could have shared it with.

I guess my point here is, in a whole lot of cases, we're all getting Milli Vanilli-ed. We're being given a pretty/attractive, quasi-talented person or group of people who if you stopped them on the street and asked them to sing you your favorite song of theirs couldn't make it sound like the album version if their life depended on it.

- The Incident