A year ago last month, The Girlfriend bought herself a new car, and along with that, she received a free one-year subscription to SiriusXM satellite radio. At first, we scorned this value-add as an unnecessary luxury, but we both quickly became rather fond of it. The lack of commercials is a big attraction, of course, but what really won us over was the variety and depth of the programming. The stations are categorized by decade and genre — e.g., classic rock, country, 1980s, etc. — which sounds as if it would be extremely constrictive, but in practice, there’s a mind-boggling number of categories to choose from, far more variety, in fact, than you find on over-the-air broadcast radio. Also, the satellite channels tend to dig much more deeply into the back catalog. We’ve both heard songs we’d forgotten we ever liked, as well as a lot of things we’d just plain forgotten… or never knew at all.
Case in point: this little ditty by a band called The Flirts, which I heard one afternoon while Anne was listening to “First Wave,” the so-called “classic alternative” channel:
I don’t remember ever hearing this one back in the day, but I’ve been unable to get it out of my head for the past couple months. A little research reveals that The Flirts were not a band in the traditional sense of the word, or rather, the girls you see in this video weren’t the ones actually singing the song. They were models and actresses hired by a guy named Bobby Orlando to be the faces for music that he himself wrote, played, and produced. The vocals were recorded by professional session singers, and then the “performers” lip-synced the tracks during “live” appearances and in music videos — exactly what Milli Vanilli were excoriated for in 1990.
The Flirts had better luck that Rob and Fab, though. I don’t know if maybe the band’s phoniness was an open secret, or if nobody cared about that sort of thing in the early ’80s, as opposed to the more uptight latter half of the decade, but The Flirts had quite a successful ten-year run that included six studio albums, 12 singles that charted in either the U.S. or Europe, or both, and even a number of international tours. This song was their first hit, landing at number 28 on Billboard‘s U.S. dance charts in 1982. In addition, the video got heavy rotation in the early days of MTV… not at all surprising, given the attractiveness of the band’s “faces.”
Incidentally, when I wax nostalgic for the fashions of the ’80s, this is the sort of thing I’m thinking of, not the heavy shoulder pads and ratted-up hair that reached such ridiculous extremes by the end of the decade. My vision of the ’80s is a lot closer to the ’70s than what most people apparently think of…
I think the hullabaloo about Milli Vanilli was the fact that they won a Grammy. Had that not happened, no one would really have cared.
And remember, it takes two jerks to be Milli Vanilli!
I remember watching the first Behind The Music, which focused on the “Brothers Vanilli” (I don’t know if they were supposed to be brothers, I just thought it sounded funny). One of them put it like this — and I’m paraphrasing here — If someone came to you, said they’d make you rich and famous, people would love you, all you have to do is dance and pretend to sing…wouldn’t you do it?
Admittedly, I was never a fan of Milli Vanilli; never thought I was “cool” enough at the time, and I hadn’t really developed my outlook as to what “cool” was yet. But watching that Behind The Music, I really ended up empathizing with them. The sad thing is that Rob Pilatus, aka “Milli” (or was he “Vanilli”?), who never really fully recovered from the fall from grace — emotionally and psychologically, that is — died not too long after the episode from a drug overdose. Shame that it had to go that way for him.
I don’t mean to hijack the post with a downer ending, so I’ll get off the proverbial soap box now.
I do remember the “Jukebox” song…but I never knew who “sang” it. And I swear I’ve seen that dude in the video before.
Geoff, I think you’re probably right about the Grammy. And I’m with you… I didn’t like Milli Vanilli’s music, but always felt very badly about their public humiliation — it’s not like they really harmed anyone or anything — and what happened to Rob was downright tragic.
Back to “Jukebox,” I agree the dude looks really familiar… I keep thinking he might have been in Eddie and the Cruisers… or maybe he just has that “look.”