Record Firms Don’t Back Deception

M illi Vanilli isn’t going to be soon forgotten. It’s a catchword that will always be good for a laugh--like the Edsel. And, unhappily, this synonym for “phony” will forever be associated with the record business.

But Milli Vanilli is an aberration, a symbol of vaunting ambition gone awry. Those of us in the business of finding and dealing with creative artists, packaging and selling their records don’t knowingly deal with deception, nor do we encourage it from any quarter.

Still, we are an industry that is expected to earn a profit, and that simple mandate can lead to excesses when the profit can’t be attained in a normal manner--and there are lots of temptations being handed to us by technology.

It’s now possible to put together a record with no musicians, no voices, no anything. But why would we want to? It’s not what we do. There are so many legitimate, talented artists out there who can produce good music and offer exciting performances that we would be fools if we deliberately set out to make fraudulent records.

If I were a record producer today, I would make sure that I selected singers who could sing; if I were going to take nobodies and make them somebodies, I would be sure they were nobodies who could sing.

The Milli Vanilli affair spotlights the kind of technology it now takes to produce records and the kind of image it, unfortunately, takes to sell some of them. Record companies have no way of policing every studio and recording session to make sure that the people credited with making an album are in fact the ones performing on it. We assume they are.

But the technology of making records has taken us long past the days when a Frank Sinatra could cut a record simply by coming into a studio and singing while a live orchestra backed him.

Nowadays, making a record is like putting together an elaborate and complicated jigsaw puzzle--with only the producer having any idea of the whole picture, with record-company executives unable to even see any work in progress.

There may be a rhythm track laid down first, then horns or other instruments added; next, a vocal layer, then perhaps a back-up vocal. The various pieces may be “sweetened” and modified in other ways long before the lead vocalist or vocalists ever get there.

All along the way, there are opportunities to substitute other people for those who are said to be there. We don’t have someone in every recording studio taking fingerprints. True, technology enables us to add augmentation in the studio to various singers and instruments--that happens all the time--but that doesn’t mean there’s widespread deception occurring.

Contemporary music is made by talented writers and performers who avail themselves of technology to create the best audio experience possible--synthesizers, 64-track recording facilities, drum machines are all now available and make for wonderful listening experiences. Motion pictures and television have been dubbing and using special effects forever. Where is it written that we have to make music with a single microphone overhead and include every mistake?

Nonetheless, the Milli Vanilli matter is a left-field intrusion. Even if the record company was aware of the circumstances, even if Arista messed this one up and made a mistake, it’s not what the company’s about. Arista is a company that records and sells talented musicians--Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Hall & Oates and many others. It doesn’t need to resort to deceptive practices to make money. I don’t think any major player in this industry is unethical in what it presents to the public.

But we are an industry that pays off big when you make it. That attracts a certain amount of hustlers and opportunists. Milli Vanilli sold 7 million albums in the United States alone, an additional 3 million in Europe. With publishing, performing, video and subsequent personal appearances, this puts at least $20 million to $30 million in play.

Video, of course, is the magic force behind a lot of the smoke and mirrors that made up Milli Vanilli. Without video--MTV, music videos, video advertising--audio wouldn’t sell as well these days. Music critics in today’s media wish that MTV weren’t so. Maybe a lot of us in the music business wish that it weren’t so, that we weren’t subject to brief video bites. But it is what it is.

We are dealing with a video generation that has grown up with MTV for the last decade. Now, as the head of a recording company I have to make decisions that take that into consideration, and so does every other recording company executive. Because of the high stakes involved, it will be possible to pull off another Milli Vanilli, but not because we in this business want it.

This situation will cause us all to check a little closer, but I assure you that no checking will have to be done with artists of the stature of Paul Simon, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Wonder, Phil Collins, Quincy Jones or any of the hundreds of other great creative men and women who make up the enormous body of American contemporary popular music that’s been the standard to which every young musician around the world has aspired for decades.