Rob & Fab/Try n' Be review, 1993

Reading Rob Sheffield’s 2024 Rolling Stone reportage on the latest Milli Vanilli revival (thanks, apparently, to “Ryan Murphy, Monsters, and the Menendez Brothers”) reminded me that I reviewed and thereby defended Rob & Fab’s otherwise entirely ignored post-Vanilli duo album in that exact same magazine 31 years ago (along with a new project by their former svengali Frank Farian). Couldn’t remember what I wrote, so I dug it up, and it didn’t make me wince much, give or take gratuitous swipes at two loud rock singers who had nothing whatsoever to do with the issue at hand. Or at least I found it less embarrassing than most things I wrote for Rolling Stone. The extremely self-reflexive/meta ending/punchline helped.

Milli Vanilli is pop music’s answer to baseball’s 1919 Chicago Black Sox — the group’s scandal will forever overshadow the way it outperformed so much of the competition during its year of glory. On the way to buy groceries in 1989, “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” and “All or Nothing” didn’t sound all that different from Bobby Brown’s hits, certainly no less spirited. If the underhanded route the duo took up the charts wasn’t exactly showbiz as usual, it was hardly unheard-of.

Fortunately, you can’t keep a good lip-syncer down. Rob & Fab proves that Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan can sing after all, more expressively than James Hetfield or Kim Gordon, maybe even than Bobby Brown himself — the falsetto pleading in “Please Don’t Throw It All Away” should shame any New Jack doo-wopper. Two songs rock through ominous iron curtains of guitar, and the next two are hip-hop house music tough enough to pass for Rob’s German countrymen in Snap. “The Land of the Free” documents Rob’s Bavarian-orphanage childhood over cheesy space disco. The dreadlocked duo even covers Cheap Trick.

Milli Vanilli’s producer was one Frank Farian, who actually hit his creative peak as the late-’70s mastermind behind Boney M — an assemblage of West Indian fashion models who dominated the European charts with a bizarre mix or nursery-rhyme harmonies, island lilts, Cossack rhythms and astronaut costumes. Farian’s new project, Try n’ Be, attempts such intriguing hybrids as Bootsy Vanilli (“Body Slam”) and Suicidal Vanilli (“When I Die”). But its only unflinching success is “Ding Dong”, a flagrantly infantile rap bolstered by a cappella bell-tower breaks. Just like Rob & Fab, Try n’ Be also covers an old hit by a humorous rock band — “Sexy Eyes”, by Dr. Hook. Nice choice, though “The Cover of Rolling Stone” would’ve been a whole lot funnier.

Rolling Stone, 10 June 1993