“Tonight we’e gonna party like its 1989″ (to paraphrase his purpleness or Prince or swiggly line thingy). So just to remind anyone who wasn’t there/ paying attention this is the Milli Vanilli performance that got record complaints lodged with the BBC for the fact that the rather … er.. well endowed band had all their bits hanging out for all to see. Auntie’s cameramen clearly didn’t know where precisely to put their bi-focals.
The greater tragedy was that the pair never did anything on their admittedly hook laden/easy on the ear records (and they really were records then). It was a not-very-photogenic ex-chef from Germany.
Reminds me somewhat of a persecuted Syrian “gay lesbian” as Jon Snow called her (I think he actually said “wretched lesbian” but I was too frazzled and dazzled to challenge the silver fox). The girl in question who had 850,000 blog-hits and her case taken up by Jeremy Paxman turned out to be a married 40 year old postgrad in Edinburgh of American extraction. He has not only had his university mail account frozen but will never live this down. This complete idiocy will stay online forever: incarcerated by internet.
I wonder if Mili vanilli’s google hits have had an upturn (ooo-er missus) in the same way as visitors to this blog. Their revival starts here.
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June 15, 2011 at 12:51 pm
monty
No, the “greater tragedy” was that one of the Milli Vanilli chaps apparently turned to crime and died of a suspected drugs overdose; so don’t hold your breath for a reunion, at least not in this world (whichever world ‘this world’ is). As for the 40 year old postgrad American in Edinburgh, there’s a kind of cruel twist – for him, at least – that says a lot about how people use the internet to enliven or escape from their dull lives. When ‘he’ was a lesbian Syrian protester he was loved and admired for his bravery, yet when he once again became his ‘real self’ he was reviled and loathed. The internet has always been about having multiple identities, secret identities, virtuous identities, wicked identities…all of which have little or nothing to do with ‘the truth’. There is no single, overriding ‘truth’ on the internet, other than to say that it is a vast sea of subjectivity where nothing much matters more than anything else. Yet our American gentleman in Edinburgh is being punished for ‘playing the game’ of the internet. His only ‘crime’ was wanting to be a somebody and not a nobody. And now he’s a somebody he probably wishes he was still a nobody because the somebody he has become nobody wants.
June 15, 2011 at 3:20 pm
monty
Actually, I should add that using that woman’s photo without her permission to put a face to the ‘lesbian Syrian’ was wrong; however, i’m not sure whether that constitutes identity theft and therefore a criminal offence.
June 15, 2011 at 7:46 pm
rupahuq
Thanks Monty. Yes maybe “tragedy” was not an appropriate choice of words and “anomaly” would have been better (?) Thank you for shedding light on MV’s afterlife too. I agree that it was bad news for the person who’s photo was nicked. Everything you post on the internet ultimnately can be used by someone somehow be it marketing companies/ giovernments/ random nutters etc. I think the postgrad said something like “nobody died” which seems misjudged but ultimately this whole affiar is probably one that many people outside the bloggershere/ commentariat have no idea- or couldn’t give two hoots about.
June 15, 2011 at 9:29 pm
monty
I don’t think it matters that people outside the bloggersphere coudn’t give two hoots about it but i think activity on the internet is increasingly important as a shaper of political and cultural opinions, particularly among those who have grown up with the internet and now look to the internet rather than TV or newspapers for their information. This lesbian-Syrian hoax is also fascinating in that it shows how a rogue blogger who hits the right nerve on a hot topic can cause potentially big waves. We’re not yet at the stage of a blogger bringing down a government, but we are seeing an increase in direct action protests being generated by internet networking (e.g. UK Uncut). The biggest threat to national security, we’re told, is not terrestrial terrrorism but cyber-terrorism, those who want to bring Britain to a grinding halt by crashing our financial systems (although our bankers are doing a pretty good job of that themselves) and by probing weaknesses in our military intelligence systems, etc. Welcome to the wonderful and frightening world of the internet…