Best Of All Time #249: Milli Vanilli–Girl I’m Gonna Miss You

Milli Vanilli—I’m Gonna Miss You
September 23, 1989 #1 [2 weeks].
Arista 9870. From the album Girl You Know It’s True

I looked for this song for 20 years. A guy I worked with gave me the cassette single back when it was popular (thanks, dude.), and I put it into heavy rotation, listening to it over and over. One day, I accidently left the cassette single on the bus.

But by that time, the scandal had broken in which the purported members of the band explained that they handn’t sung on the album, but they wanted to. The music community gave out a collective gasp of shock, took back the grammy that Milli Vanilli had won, gave their money back to album buyers who returned the album, and pulled the record from the shelves.

But when I wanted to buy a copy of the song and/or the album, it could not be had for love or money. Now, I had not been shocked or even surprised by the revelation. The Monkees had had a similar fight over playing their own instruments (although it was their actual voices on those records). I didn’t care whose picture was on the album cover, and it didn’t bother me any more than discovering that the girl on the Car’s Candy-O album cover was not an actual Car.

I hadn’t gone to any of the concerts, and maybe if I had, I’d feel differently. But I thought the grammies were designed to honor recorded music. I mean, somebody was singing on the album; find out who it was and give them the freakin’ grammy. Then, put their picture on the album cover, market it as the “new” Milli Vanilli, and let’s move on.

Instead, the music industry tried to excise the band from all music history. Suddenly, no one had ever heard of Milli Vanilli. The albums remained pulled from the shelves. When the internet came along, none of the music listening sites – to this day – have had Milli Vanilli music available. My wife finally had to get me the CD on eBay because she was tired of hearing me complain about it. Arista, the record company who had committed the original falsification and the (even more annoying) cover up, came out of it unscathed.

But writing about that whole mess, I’m too mad to talk about the song itself. The song is great, with sultry male vocals, seductive as I only wish I could be. But so what? You’ll never hear the song until the record company decides to finally get over it. C’mon guys, it’s been twenty years. It’s time.