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- Behind the Music: Beyond Bertrand lies a history of plastic performances | Helienne Lindvall
Ça Plane Pour Moi is far from the only case where there has been doubt about whether the face of a pop act matches up with the voice
When Milli Vanilli were outed, back in 1990, for not actually singing on their own albums, most of the music industry reacted with a shrug. The only surprise was that anyone had ever believed Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus sang songs such as Girl You Know It's True in the first place, considering the thick European accents they spoke in.
Of course, this wasn't the first time Frank Farian, Milli Vanilli's creator and producer, had used creative licence to create an illusion. Apart from altering his own name (perhaps Franz Reuther wasn't international enough?) when he originally created Boney M, Farian allegedly sang the vocals himself and hired performers to front the act (although members Liz Mitchell and Marcia Bennett were deemed strong enough singers for their real voices to be used, and all members were said to have sung live during concerts). Judging from pictures of Farian, this was a shrewd business decision; few can pull off aluminium foil briefs as well as frontman Bobby Farrell did on the cover of Boney M's Love For Sale.
The fact that Morvan and Pilatus were merely miming to someone else's vocals wouldn't even have become such a big story if it wasn't for Milli Vanilli winning a Grammy award for best new artist in February 1990, beating fellow nominees Neneh Cherry, Indigo Girls, Soul II Soul and Tone-Loc. One of the act's "ghost vocalists", Charles Shaw, had already made the revelation in a New York paper months earlier, only, reportedly, for Farian to pay him off to retract the statement. Apparently Farian had not deemed him attractive enough to front the act. It's difficult to know if he was right, judging by the pics on Shaw's MySpace page, but as he's called it originalvoiceofmillivanilli, I assume his career didn't exactly take off afterwards. But neither did the careers of Morvan and Pilatus. They had to return their Grammy once Farian revealed the truth, later that year, and were largely viewed as a joke until Pilatus's tragic death as the result of an overdose in 1998.
But despite all this history, I was surprised by this week's reports that 1970s one-hit wonder Plastic Bertrand didn't sing Ça Plane Pour Moi. Not because he'd mimed but because Lou Deprijck filed a lawsuit to prove he was the singer. Like Farian, he produced and wrote the track himself. An angry Plastic Bertrand (real name Roger Jouret) told Belgian daily Le Soir earlier this week that Deprijck set up the whole deception himself, adding that Deprijck asked him to "shut up" in exchange for 0.5% of the rights. So did the producer sue in order to line his pockets or to get proper acknowledgment for his, er, brilliant vocals – over 30 years after the record's release?
You may think that cases like Boney M, Milli Vanilli, Plastic Bertrand, Black Box (in which Loleatta Holloway's vocals on 1989 worldwide hit Ride On Time were mimed by model Catherine Quinol) and C&C Music Factory (Martha Wash provided vocals for them and Blackbox but didn't get credited until she brought lawsuits under truth-in-advertising laws), are a thing of the past. Sadly not.
One notable UK top five hit from the last couple of years, on which the chorus was sung by a female, was actually sung by one of the co-writers of the track, not the performer credited as the featured vocalist. The actual singer was told she was too old (though she's actually younger than the woman who ended up getting the credit and miming in the video) and paid a one-off £1,000 fee. The same thing happened on the follow-up single, though the singer didn't even get a fee for that one, just her train travel to the studio reimbursed. Now, why on earth would she accept such an arrangement? The person in charge of the project told her that, if she refused, they'd make sure she'd "never work in the music industry again". As she's just starting out in the business she felt intimidated and backed down.
We'll never know if the songs they recorded would have been as successful if they'd been justly and fairly credited. I think they would have, but maybe I have too much belief in the power of a great pop song. How much do we actually care about the age and looks of performers? How superficial are we, really? The record labels seem to think: very.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Переслать - Inception brings the trend for slow music to the big screen
Composer Hans Zimmer's ultra-slow manipulation of an Edith Piaf song displays the beauty in bringing the BPM right down
The malevolent, booming horns that sound throughout Inception are one of the film's finest features. Their power lies not just in volume and repetition, but also in rebuilding part of the film's architecture, just as Ellen Page and Leonardo DiCaprio's characters rebuild the architecture in their dreams.
Without giving away the plot, Edith Piaf's Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien plays a crucial role in linking Inception's real and dream worlds. Now it's emerged that Hans Zimmer, who composed the music, extrapolated his entire score from the Piaf song. In keeping with the atmosphere of blurred consciousness, Zimmer slows down the brass sounds to a somnambulant trudge.
What was once human, defiant and romantic is now lurching, formidable and unstable. Zimmer does something that numerous artists have also recently realised – that slowing music down dissolves and recasts it.
Games, the duo featuring Joel Ford and Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin, have been releasing mixtapes of slowed-down 80s hits over the past year. For Lopatin, who has railed against the often limited sonic palette of underground music, these tapes are proof that slowing down music dismissed as cheesy reveals its weirdness, beauty and potential.
Chopped and screwed is a form of hip-hop from Houston that slows tracks down to a crawl. Perhaps the sweltering heat of Texas encourages this lethargy? The muggy clarity of the weed and cough-syrup highs sought on the scene also heighten the music's sensuality. As Scott Wright noted on this blog, chopped and screwed has been influential on "drag" artists, while mainstream rappers often use a few bars of a screwed, ultra-deep vocal to push their masculinity into the red, a fast-track to thuggishness. Meanwhile Ciara's recent return to the sound is canny; set against the uptempo European house beats of chart rap, her slowness thrills.
As much as I love Zimmer's music for Inception, I wondered what Philip Jeck, the master of the musical subconscious, would have done with it. Jeck resurrects battered vinyl classics, slowing down and looping the likes of Aaron Copeland to create fragments of songs echoing across time and sleep.
In a hyperactive digital world, slowed-down music pushes you back into your chair and demands you sit still; it forces you to consider the structures built and choices made. As with Inception, it casts light on a potential world where music sounds different and life runs in an unfamiliar gear.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - A musical accompaniment
Do you find a soundtrack can enhance your enjoyment of eating out? What's the worst you've had to endure?
Like many home-workers, I've got a 'local' I occasionally repair to for lunch. It's useful, now and again, to be able to get away from the keyboard, not have to worry about whipping up food or cleaning up afterwards and just sit, immersed in thought.
My local is a cheap and cheerful family-run sushi joint. They do great set lunch, greet you with a smile and tend to leave you, politely, to your contemplation. They also have the most agonising soundtrack known to man. When the the US Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms besieged their compound in Waco Texas, they played rock music over speakers in an attempt to break the spirits of the Branch Davidians within. I've always assumed they used something like Bon Jovi, but they didn't have access to a single, stretched tape loop of The Carpenters' greatest hits. In Japanese.
I've worked in enough restaurants to know that the staff simply don't notice the music after the first few shifts. This is fortunate because there's not a great deal of variety. An establishment obeying the law will either have an expensive "pub play" system where a monthly fee covers performance rights for recorded music or they'll have a very limited selection of playlists usually compiled by a DJ in consultation with the proprietor to "reflect the brand" of the restaurant. Either way, the staff don't get much choice.I bounced for a while in an unspeakable Tex-Mex hole that kept eight CDs of twangly guitar rock, to which the floor staff seemed entirely immune. The crew, the usual international mix of students and travellers, must be all over the world now, being, I hope, entirely useful members of society. They're probably not even aware of how deeply programmed they are. They have no idea why, when Miserlou comes on their local radio station, they suddenly smell coriander, hear the distant sizzling sound of a cast iron fajita dish, and catch the evanescent whiff of tequila vomit. I like to imagine them all out there, schoolteachers, doctors, traffic wardens and fishermen, all twitching like the neurasthenic nightclub vets they really are.
Once a year the boss would introduce the Christmas compilation to the cycle. We could handle Phil Spector's festive offerings but several tracks, notably the novelty arrangements of carols barked by dogs, would stop them dead in their tracks, inexplicable rage passing behind their eyes, and inexplicable randomness would occur. Who could fail to be moved by the sight of a punter being dragged across the bar by an enraged 5'6" barback and kicked unconscious to the strains of Silent Night yipped by a corgi?
But why do they do it? Why do restaurants feel the need to give us a soundtrack at all? It's been posited that the Hard Rock Cafe, the original noise-themed restaurant, hung all that memorabilia on the walls so punters on dates would have something to talk about, and then turned up the music so they wouldn't have to. In other venues, tinkly new-age lift music is intended to impart an air of calm, alongside the ubiquitous fibreglass buddha and pointless bowls of floating petals. Antonio Vivaldi, putting quill to vellum in 18th-century Venice, could hardly have dared dream that the high points of his oeuvre would one day be used to make mid-range cafes in university towns seem "a bit more classy".
I admit, I've been to one or two places with pretensions where the combination of the thick carpet, the sepulchral hush of the dining room and the priestly demeanour of the waiting staff has grated - and I've been forced to sing under my breath. Usually, out of a sense of loyalty to my favourite, uncomplicated local, it's a phonetic rendition of Close to You embellished with wow and flutter.
Do you find a soundtrack can enhance your enjoyment of eating? What's the worst you've had to endure?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Music Weekly: South African house special
Music Weekly returns with something a little different. The eyes of the world have been on South Africa for the 2010 World Cup but, away from football, the country also boasts a thriving house music scene. This was the one sound the vuvuzelas failed to drown out: house beats blasted from clubs, shebeens and car stereos.
This week, we hand over our podcast to those involved in the scene. Singer Pastor Mbhobho tells us how kwaito, the township music that soundtracked post-apartheid South Africa, upped the tempo and formed an exciting new fusion with house music.
DJ Cleo explains how a braai – a South African BBQ – is as good a place to hear house music as a club, and tells us why it's important to have traditional African drumming in his music.
We also hear from journalist Smalz Ngobese who explains why taxi ranks are the best place to buy house mixtapes. And DJ Oskido explains how wider interest in South African house started with a Masters at Work record deal four years ago, which led to the genre dominating this year's Miami Winter Music Conference. Finally, Black Coffee tells us about being played on the UK funky scene.
Listen to the show and let us know what you think. Alexis and Rosie will be back in the hot seat next week for more exclusive interviews and world-dominating music chat. See you then.
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