And then there was… one? Going into this past weekend, there were two out of nine artists booked for the “Freedom 250” concerts in Washington, D.C. that were still proclaiming an eagerness to do the gig: Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli‘s Fab Morvan. Now that number has been halved, as Morvan, who said he was still into it as recently as Friday, went on CNN Monday night to declare he’s now decided to follow most of the other artists out the exit door.
“This is not what I signed up for,” Morvan said on the news network. “When I saw Young MC pulled out, I was like, ‘Well, that’s weird… What does he know that I don’t know?’ So I was a little worried there, and then one after the next, people started to leave. But I was told by my team, who was told by another team, ‘There’s nothing, there’s no political alignment.’ … I was there to unite the people, to have them walk down memory lane, celebrate life. It was a way to say, ‘Hey, I’m still here, you’re still here. Let’s have a good time together.’ But throughout the week it turned into a circus. I’m not into politics, so you hear it first here: I’m not attending the June 26th celebration.”
It may be a moot point now, anyway, after President Donald J. Trump posted over the weekend that would like to just “cancel it,” apparently referring to the entire concert series. Whether Trump’s Truth Social comment means all the music has been officially cancelled or it might still be up to a Freedom 250 commission is unclear. But if the series is indeed toast, Morvan saying he wants to opt out now could be a case of saying “You can’t fire me, because I quit.”
On Thursday of last week, as other artists dropped out, Morvan was insistent he was sticking with it. “I am here to entertain and unite people, not divide them,” he said then. “Let’s celebrate life & music and take a trip down memory lane. I feel honored to be a part of the Great American State Fair as it will celebrate the 250 Year Anniversary of America with so many other accomplished artists. Looking forward to reconnecting with you across the USA this summer and to finally sing Milli Vanilli songs live in person!”
The death watch for the series began when Morris Day insisted that his appearance was only a “rumour,” only hours after the concerts were first announced Wednesday, in response to immediate backlash he got for seeming to have signed up for a Trump-related event. Young MC soon followed, then Martina McBride, then the Commodores, then Bret Michaels. C&C Music Factory’s Freedom Williams posted an infamous video from his commode in which he waffled about whether to still do the show. Flo Rida just refused to say anything about it. That left Vanilla Ice and and Morvan as the two openly enthusiastic participants, until the surviving Milli Vanilli frontman changed his tune Monday night.
It probably didn’t help that over the weekend Trump appeared to be referring to all of the acts booked for the concerts as “overpriced singers who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring,” seemingly not carving out any exceptions for the couple who were sticking with the program.
Said Morvan Monday night, “I don’t even try to enter into this arena. You know, I deal with everyday people… I have a very special story. I fell, I stood back up, I reinvented myself, and I’ve moved forward, and for many, I am an example,” he added, referring to the Milli Vanilli lip-synch scandal he and Rob Pilatus got caught up in in the ’90s, before trying to prove themselves as actual singers. “So when you fall into a, a storm like this one, all I can do is say, ‘I don’t want none of that.’… I know what it’s like to have a narrative being changed over and over until you don’t even recognise this narrative, and that’s what happened to me.”
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There was confusion from the start about Milli Vanilli’s involvement, as the initial announcement was quickly followed by a woman who sang on the original Milli Vanilli albums, Jodie Rocco, issuing a statement that she and others who sang the real vocals on those albums would not be taking part. But she was not speaking for Morvan, who said he bought the rights to the name and has continued to tour under the Milli banner.
As for Vanilla Ice, he was on CNN earlier Monday, still sticking up for his participation. “All we’re doing is celebrating the birthday of our country. What’s the big deal here? … I’d play for anybody. I’d go play for Biden’s family or anybody. It doesn’t matter.” In an earlier interview, Ice declared that he’d “never voted in my life” and said he would perform for “Putin, whoever you want — I’d go to Iran. Don’t matter.”
The main gripe cited by several artists who pulled out earlier was that the concerts, the Great American State Fair and Freedom 250 were officially billed as “nonpartisan” but weren’t really turning out that way. Now that Trump has proposed replacing the concerts with one of his MAGA rallies (claiming that, as a speaker, he has a bigger audience than any musician, even Elvis), that would seem to negate any ongoing argument that the events are meant to be nonpartisan.
Trump has taken criticism from the right as well as from the centre and left over how the Freedom 250 fracas ended up.
MAGA commentator Matt Walsh has been especially critical of this as a black eye for the president, and in a video posted Monday, he mocked the idea that the president replacing music with one of his customary speeches was a good idea.
“It’s not the kind of main event that’s going to draw in huge audiences,” Walsh said. “And more importantly, it’s not the best way to highlight the achievements of this country going back hundreds of years. America 250 should be a party, a celebration, not something that is about Donald Trump, or where Donald Trump is the main act. And the fact is that nobody in the entire history of parties has ever wanted to sit and listen to a 90-minute speech from a politician. You’ve never showed up to a party and said ‘Hey, this is great, when do the speeches start?’ A political rally is not a party.
“And what’s more,” Walsh continued, “several of the acts that pulled out claimed they were doing so because the event was more political than they had been told. Well, turning the event into a literal political rally would seem to legitimise their concerns, so Trump is handing them a PR victory on top of everything else.”
From Variety US