Film & Discussion
Blackness and Identity Making in Popular Music

Film Screening: Milli Vanilli
Conversation with Alexander Ghedi Weheliye and Matthew D. Morrison

Fri, 10/04/2024
6:00 PM EDT Goethe-Institut Boston

 

6:00 PM
Film Screening of Milli Vanilli
Documentary directed by Luke Korem, produced by MRC and Keep on Running Pictures
USA 2023, 106min, digital

MILLI VANILLI tells the story of Robert “Rob” Pilatus and Fabrice “Fab” Morvan, who became fast friends during their youth in Germany. With Rob coming from a broken home and Fab having left an abusive household, they shared a similar upbringing and future goal: to become famous superstars.

In a few short years, their dreams came true. In 1989 their first album went platinum six times in the U.S., and the hit song “Girl You Know It’s True” sold more than 30 million singles worldwide. Rob and Fab, better known as “Milli Vanilli,” became the world’s most popular pop duo in 1990 and won the GRAMMY for Best New Artist.
However, their ascension to success came with a devastating price that ultimately led to their infamous undoing.

8:30 PM
Conversation with Alexander Ghedi Weheliye and Matthew D. Morrison

Taking the 2023 documentary about music group, Milli Vanilli, as the starting point, the conversation will focus on the role of Blackness and identity making in the history of German popular music. Milli Vanilli’s late 1980s racialized performance forms part of a longer tradition of Blackness and Blackface produced in Germany during 1970s and 1980s Eurodisco as well as Eurodance in the 1990s. In this context, Blackness forms an integral part of how Germany imagines itself in relation to the rest of the world. 

With the help of sound samples, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye and Matthew D. Morrison give insight into issues of cultural appropriation that have plagued popular music from the beginning with a focus on Germany and the US.


About the Speakers
 
Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is an Associate Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University, an. M.A. in Musicology from The Catholic University of America, and was a Presidential music scholar at Morehouse College. His published work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, American Music, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, Oxford Handbooks, art forums/publications, and on Oxford University Press's online music blog. Matthew has been awarded several fellowships from Institutions such as the American Council of Learned Societies (Susan McClary and Robert Walser Endowed Fellow), Harvard University (Hutchins Center Fellow), the American Musicological Society, Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the Center for Popular Music Studies/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He serves as a consultant, advisor, and facilitator with arts organizations, such as The Schubert Club, “The Sound Track of America” opening concert series at the SHED, NYC, The Glimmerglass Festival Opera, as well as Theory, Warner Music Group, and SONY music. Matthew’s book, Blacksound: Making Race in Popular Music in the United States, is published by The University of California Press (2024). 
 
Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is Malcolm S. Forbes Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University, where he teaches critical theory, Black literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), and Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology (2023).  Currently, he is working on two projects. The first, Modernity Hesitant: The Civilizational Diagnostics of W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin, tracks the different ways in which these thinkers imagine the marginal as central to the workings of modern civilization. The second, Schwarz-Sein: Black Life beyond the Human, which situates Blackness as an ungendered ontology of unbelonging. 

His work has been published in many journals, and the anthologies Black Europe and the African Diaspora, The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht: (K)erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache, and re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland. A selection of his writings can be found here: