Rob Pilatus

Robert "Rob" Pilatus (June 8, 1964 – 2 April 1998) was a German model, dancer, and singer. Pilatus was half of the pop music duo Milli Vanilli.

Biography

Early life

Rob Pilatus was born in Munich, Germany, the son of an American soldier and a German mother. He was adopted as an infant by a German family. Pilatus worked as a model and break dancer, also appearing as a backing singer with the group Wind at the 1987 Eurovision Song Contest in Brussels before joining Fab Morvan in 1988 to form the pop group Milli Vanilli.

Milli Vanilli

Pilatus and Morvan were noticed by music producer Frank Farian, who signed them to be part of a musical act. Shortly after a trip to Turkey, where the duo reputedly took its name from a local advertising slogan, Milli Vanilli was born. Pilatus and Morvan served as the public faces for singers Charles Shaw and Brad Howell, whom Farian thought were vocally talented but lacked a marketable image.

The first Milli Vanilli platinum album was Girl You Know It's True, which became a worldwide hit. The album produced five hit singles including three number 1 hits, "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You", "Baby Don't Forget My Number" and "Blame It On The Rain". Milli Vanilli won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist on 21 February 1990, for "Girl You Know It's True".

Milli Vanilli

Milli Vanilli was a West German-based R&B, pop and dance music project created by Frank Farian in Munich in 1988. The group was formed with Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus. The group's debut album Girl You Know It's True achieved international success and earned them a Grammy Award for Best New Artist on 21 February 1990. Milli Vanilli became one of the most popular pop acts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their success turned to infamy when the Grammy award was withdrawn after Morvan, Pilatus and their agent Sergio Vendero confessed that Morvan and Pilatus did not actually sing any of the vocals heard on the record. The group recorded a comeback album in 1998, but Rob Pilatus died before the album was released.

Beginnings

According to VH1's Behind the Music, the single "Girl You Know It's True" was first produced by Jesse Powell and had already been completed before Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan were recruited. Frank Farian felt that no efforts should be focused on refining Pilatus and Morvan's voices. Farian added his own studio-augmented voice to recordings, using back-up singers to hide the other two members' voices live.

Fab Morvan

Fabrice "Fab" Morvan (born 14 May 1966) is a French singer-songwriter, dancer and model. He was half of the pop duo Milli Vanilli, with Rob Pilatus, selling multi-platinum albums around the world. However, he was later involved in one of the largest scandals in pop music history when it was revealed that neither he nor Pilatus had actually sung on any of Milli Vanilli's recordings. After the scandal, the group reformed as Rob & Fab in the 1990s with limited success. Morvan had a solo comeback in the 2000s releasing his first solo album, Love Revolution.

Biography

Early years

Morvan was born in 1966 in Paris, France, to parents from Guadeloupe. At 18, he moved to Germany, where he was a dancer and model, and was influenced by funk, soul, rap and pop music. He met Rob Pilatus in a nightclub in Munich. They decided to form a rock/soul group.

Milli Vanilli

Morvan and Pilatus were noticed by music producer Frank Farian, who signed them as part of a musical act. Shortly after a trip to Turkey, where they reputedly got the band's name from a local advertising slogan, Milli Vanilli was born. Morvan and Pilatus served as the public faces for singers Charles Shaw, John Davis, and Brad Howell, who Farian thought were talented musicians but lacked a marketable image.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Gail Winfrey, born January 29, 1954, is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is now North America's first and only multi-billionaire Black. Several assessments regard her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

Where Are They Now

"Where Are They Now" is a song recorded by English Oi!/punk rock band Cock Sparrer in 1982, from their album Shock Troops. The lyrics comment on the previous six years of the punk subculture. The song portrays the early years of the punk movement in a negative light, bemoaning the lack of follow-through by the leading figures. It also comments on the band members' own naivete, exhorting listeners to not make the same idealistic mistakes. Its lyrics mention several punk legends. In an interview with the fanzine Schizoipunx from July 27, 2006, Mickey Beaufoy of Cock Sparrer stated:

The lyrics "Rotten on the telly, showing what a few choice words can do" refer to the Sex Pistols' lead singer Johnny Rotten and the Grundy incident, in which Rotten and other Sex Pistols swore on live television, sending Britain into an uproar.

The song has been covered and recorded by Swingin Utters, Strike Anywhere, Roger Miret And The Disasters and also, in their own language, the Spanish band La Polla Records and the German band Beck's Pistols.