Music fans in need of growth hormone. Please help.

In the music industry, how much phony is too much? When news broke that the voices behind 1980's group Milli Vanilli were in fact not the people lip syncing on stage, to many people at the time, that was too much phony.

Paying to watch someone lip syncing to thier own voice is fine. Even if that recording has been electronically enhanced, edited, re-taked, adjusted, etc, that's fine. Lip syncing to someone else, well, that's just fraud!

To anyone who did feel conned, and even felt the need to go out and have thier copies crushed by a steamroller, exactly what were you expecting when you bought your copy? Presumably, when you heard the music on your radio on on TV, you liked it enough to go and buy your own copy. Does the music have a lower value now you realise it wasn't a pair of nice young men in dreadlocks but some old fat bloke instead?

For a lousy one pound eighty, tell me, what did you expect?

He could quite clearly sing well enough for you to buy the record. Does it matter who was really the voice? If it does, well, in my opinion, you deserve to lose the money you paid. I would also wonder if you deserve the oxygen you are currently using. You get a sound recording when you hand your money over, and that's what you got.

Maybe there's an argument for the distribution of money, that the two "nice young men" shouldn't get the royalty payments. Come on, this is the music industry we are talking about.

This article was written by me, Bill Godfrey, based on my recollections from an article I wrote when the news had just broke. It never got published at the time, and I only just recalled it having just seen a mini-documentary on the subject.