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January 22, 2009 9:44 PM

A few words on lip-synching and Milli Vanilli

The headlines said Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and others "join the ranks ... of Milli Vanilli" because they mimed a performance at the Inauguration on Tuesday because the weather was too cold to allow them to actually play live.

That's just plain inaccurate.

Even the New York Times got it wrong, saying Milli Vanilli was "the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because of its lip-synching, making it synonymous with the practice."

Yes, Milli Vanilli lip-synched in concert, as does everyone from Eminem to Madonna to Britney Spears. Milli Vanilli was stripped of its Grammy, however, because the two members of the group never sang on the actual album. Other singers did those vocals, and it was to those voices that the group lip-synched live. Again: Lip-synching is something you do onstage or on TV, pretending that you're singing live a song you actually sung. Milli Vanilli lost the Grammy because they never actually sang the songs credited to them. Minor but important distinction.

What the musicians played along to at the Inaugural was a recording they'd made two days before just in case. So Yo-Yo Ma was pretending to play music he had actually played. Not the same as Milli Vanilli.

Update:

Before I posted this item, I sent an email to the New York Times pointing out the inaccuracy of their analysis, quoted above. A half-hour after I sent that, the story was updated to read:

"the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because they did not sing on their album and lip-synched in concerts."

Still not entirely accurate -- no one's going to be stripped of a Grammy for lip-synching in concert, so that's a ruse -- but better.

The lede was also changed:

It was not precisely lip-synching, but pretty close.

It's not that I influenced that; the mistake must have been noticed around the world and an avalanche of email got it corrected.

Still, most media will pick up on the original inaccuracy and repeat that fallacy from here on out. The Yahoo News story, taken from the New York Times, is all over the web and referred to Milli Vanilla as"the late 1980s group stripped of a Grammy for lip-syncing."

And while that's a more-accepted spelling (lip-syncing versus lip-synching), it's still wrong.

But that version will become the urban myth. Just you watch.



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