NEWS ANALYSIS : When Entertainment Lip-Syncs Modern Life : Pop culture: What does it say about society when the best of its technology helps Milli Vanilli and other poseurs pull off the big lie?

Christian: I wish I had your wit .

Cyrano: Borrow it, then! Your beautiful young manhood--lend me that. And we two make one hero of romance! --Edmond Rostand, in “Cyrano de Bergerac”

The idea is far from new.

A hundred years before good-looking Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan won teen-age hearts with someone else’s artistry, French dramatist Edmond Rostand was writing about the handsome Christian using the voice and poems of homely Cyrano to win the lovely Roxanne.

Today, such trickery operates throughout society, and often to no one’s surprise. It’s so common for ghostwriters to prepare presidential speeches that some, like Ronald Reagan’s Peggy Noonan, become famous in their own right. Celebrity books are ghostwritten, and politicians from Sen. Joseph Biden to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., are accused of plagiarism.

“You have to remember that music is a mirror of the times,” said Jimmy Bowen, president of Capitol Records, Nashville. “And when the mirror is close to what’s happening. That’s what sells. The times we live in are very plastic. There are a lot of phony things happening in people’s daily lives. So (Milli Vanilli) is just playing the game, which says something about the times we live in.”

Just two weeks ago, producer Frank Farian orchestrated the fall of Pilatus and Morvan, whose rise to fame as the duo Milli Vanilli Farian had also wrought, by announcing that the two had not sung a note on their Grammy-winning album, “Girl You Know It’s True.”

Now, with the Grammy returned and Pilatus and Morvan feverishly insisting that they truly can sing, the real voices behind the album are preparing to cut a record and go on tour themselves--with Farian again at the helm and without pretty faces to help them win acceptance.

From the original, prolonged fakery--which could not have been pulled off without the best in modern technology--to the decision to finally take the real artists out on tour, the entire fiasco begs a serious look at modern culture.

Are we so insecure as to believe with Cyrano that no one will see our inner beauty, that we must live vicariously through actors and mimes instead of following our hearts? And have we done that through technology, using our precious electronics as the Olympians feared we would use fire--to pretend to be as gods?

Where, really, does one place Milli Vanilli? Is the duo an example of demon technology gone wild, rogue electronics so sophisticated that the age-old obsession with image can be played out in its extreme before believers numbering in the millions?

Or are they and producer Farian nothing so insidious, but simply the first heralds of a new era in entertainment, pioneers of a day when the credits on an interactive videodisc will will have spots for writers, producers, singers and lip-syncing dancers?

In a sense, Pilatus, Morvan and Farian are music’s inheritance from the glittering, plastic ‘80s. They are the Drexel Burnham of pop, selling their musical version of junk bonds collateralized against the silence of the real singers.

“It’s part of the march of art and technology, and when you’re into any march there are probably going to be some unfortunate turns to the left or right,” said Brian Banks, a co-owner of Los Angeles’ Sonar Productions who has worked extensively with high-tech musical projects. “This might be our own little Michael Milken here: bend the rules until maybe you broke the rules.”

Historically, Milli Vanilli can be seen as an outgrowth of the lip-syncing drag shows of the gay discos in the 1970s. When that genre exploded into the mainstream, dance artists including the just-starting Madonna happily lip-synced to disco tunes while gyrating across the stage with a dead microphone.

A concurrent growth of technology created recording studios where anything was possible--including the creation and repetition of innumerable sounds, drumbeats and instruments--and with it the rise of the producer as a sort of puppeteer, who could use artists and computers as musical paintbrushes to make the sound he or she envisioned.

Add video, and in comes the second element of the equation: image. With possibility of making millions of dollars with the right “package,” the ingredients for Milli Vanilli are all there.

“What these people did is a logical extension of a whole process that started by saying what’s more important is the package and not what’s in it,” said Richard Kurtz, director of clinical training in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. “In a society that doesn’t give you time to get to know anyone, where everyone is a stranger, where the only information given is in short bursts, it’s not surprising that something like this happened.”

Psychologically, image has been of increasing importance in Western society since the onset of industrialization, Kurtz said. As the old agrarian system crumbled, taking centuries-old customs and social structures with it, people turned to image and appearance as a way to judge themselves and others.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, laws actually prohibited people from dressing up as aristocrats if they weren’t of noble descent.

Today, dependence on image has grown to such an extreme that Americans spend millions of dollars each year on plastic surgery, and millions more telling psychologists that they feel lost.

“When society breaks down, all you have is image to rely on,” Kurtz said.

As urbanization has accelerated, and as technological changes have made information processing faster, there is just less time for people to get to know each other,” he said. “You don’t have time for research, you’re faced with too many disparate chunks of information. So (believing in) images replaces our old way of getting to know people over time.”

Today, we think we are getting to know people if we watch them emote on a three minute music video, or speak in a two minute news interview.

How did we get here?

If the seed was a preoccupation with image, the fertilizer had to be technology.

While Cyrano had to hide in the bushes to feed Christian his lines, producer Farian simply had to gather singers, musicians and synthesizers in his studio. Whereas one woman, Roxanne, saw Christian at the theater and fell in love--albeit with an image and not the real person--millions of fans saw Milli Vanilli dozens of times, up very close, in their own living rooms.

And, of course, tens of thousands of American teens and adults saw Pilatus and Morvan appear to be singing on innumerable stages, with perfect sound, choreographed dance moves and and impressive light shows.

“Technology today is such that it’s limitless,” said Kim Buie, vice president for West Coast artists and repertory for Island Records. “I think technology made a big difference for Milli Vanilli. They took two good-looking kids and made it as if they could sing.”

The biggest technological leaps have been made in the last 20 years.

“It used to be (that recording was done on) a two-track tape machine,” said Joe Smith, president of Capitol-EMI Music., Inc. “And then I remember seeing recording on eight tracks. Then the eight became 16 and the 16 became 32. We’ve got a board downstairs that looks like it will fly a whole fleet of jets.”

One of the most important devices in the modern studio is the sampler. A type of synthesizer, samplers are capable of storing and repeating sounds that have been digitally recorded into their computer memory disks. A sampler allows a producer to make music without having a musician present. It is most commonly used in rap and dance music, to take a sound and repeat it over and over under the lyric.

John King, who with his partner Mike Simpson as Dust Brothers Music has produced songs for the Beastie Boys, Tone Loc and other rap and dance groups, said that samplers allow producers to create or remix entire songs without hiring a single musician.

“For the Tone Loc album, he would come in and lay vocals over a click track, (which is) a very sparse beat,” King said. “Then after we had his vocals, we would just create the entire song around it.”

The producers make the song and generally share writer credit with the artist.

A sampler and combined with other types of synthesizers can put an out of tune singer on pitch, create an accompaniment and even merge the sounds of two instruments to create something completely new. At a live concert, the sampler can compensate for the singer when he or she goes off key, and can even store difficult passages for the performer to lip sync.

“A sampler takes a digital recording of a finite length and then you can play them faster or slower or do some tricks with them,” said Sonar’s Banks, who is a consultant to New England Digital Corp., which makes one of the most sophisticated electronic music machines, the Synclavier.

The Synclavier is a synthesizer with a sampler and a music sequencer combined. Its electronic keyboard interfaces with a computer to create hundreds of musical sounds as well as record, store, orchestrate and even print musical scores.

With musical equipment like this, the producer can become in a sense the composer and artist, using electronic sounds and some live recordings as the clay from which he or she sculpts an album. While to some degree this has been true in the past--the legendary Phil Spector established the producer-as- auteur with groups such as the Ronettes and the Crystals--it is much more prevalent today, thanks to technology.

The music video simply adds another element to the whole project. And in the particularly visually oriented world of dance pop, where videos are shown in discotheques, the people on the screen become in a sense just another lump of clay, another set of colors on the palette of the producer.

Viewed this way, Milli Vanilli can be seen as Frank Farian’s art project. The duo certainly was not the first lip-syncing producer project to hit the circuit--it was just bold enough to tell the big lie on a big scale.

“We’re dealing with a public that’s grown up with video, with a short attention span,” said Capitol-EMI president Smith. “I would like to see more people playing their instruments and getting a live feel. But the fact that Madonna and Janet Jackson put on concerts lip-syncing indicates the need to put on a spectacle.”

But some in the industry say the tide is turning around a bit. David Bianco, an engineer who has recently worked with M. C. Hammer, Karen White and Aerosmith, said he thinks the public is moving away from hyper-produced dance grooves.

“I think people are fed up with computers and they’re fed up and more suspicious of tricks,” Bianco said. “I think the Milli Vanilli thing brings it to a head.”

The lesson is, again, an old one, as much about society and people as it is about music.

When we come to care for someone, said USC psychologist Chaytor Mason, that person becomes beautiful to us--without plastic surgery, without fat farms, even without stylish clothing.

Women have loved such unattractive heroes as Henry Kissinger and Abraham Lincoln, men have fallen for Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. Roxanne, in the end, loved Cyrano and found him beautiful.

So perhaps the real singers behind Milli Vanilli would have found their own popularity eventually. With their new album on the way, perhaps they will yet succeed. But in the beginning at least and until the scandal forced them to reveal the truth, neither they, nor their producers, nor really the audience, believed that the music did not have to have a pretty face.

We are so used to thinking of the people we love as beautiful that sometimes we become confused, according to Mason, and think that people who are beautiful are the people we love.