As a teenager, I used to visit a local fine arts museum through school trips and with family. There was a Picasso painting there that I always used to gaze at but never really appreciated it until one day, several visits later, it finally "hit" me. Then I fell in love. As I was thinking about this memory, this experience, it dawned on me how this experience in some ways parallels another more contemporary experience. There is a distinction between arts and fine arts. Film music is commonly commercial and weighs mostly on entertainment factor. For example, if you look at the music of SEL, they have a very entertaining, uplifting style of composition that's very celebratory in nature. It's one of the reasons why I like them a lot. Their music is instantly likeable, catchy, makes you feel positive. Yet, their music also sounds fresh and not stale. Some other good MDs out there also follow this example.
With Rahman by comparison, the additional factor in his music is his dabbling into the finer arts in terms of his compositional style. There are splashess of Western classical, Indian classical, jazz, folk in his music laid out more in depth and elaborated than any other MD's works. When I hear a great Rahman composition, I find more subtlety, more refined beauty in the sound, the arrangements, the melody hits you very differently than a piece that's instantly likeable and catchy. Hence, why we often need repeated listens for the song to finally "hit" us due to the deeper layers and us as listeners being forced to acoomodate to the new musical directions rather than assimilate to an existing one. Of course, many of Rahman's songs are also instantly accessable and catchy, but more often than not, there is this finer arts aspect to his music that makes his scores very special. Sometimes his songs evoke images of a Picaso painting, a Leonardo De Vinci sculpture......striking, yet subtle, booming yet modest, divinely beautiful yet subdued. Rarely is his music ever flashy, gaudy, obvious. It's the subtlety, the refined beauty of his songs overlapping into the finer arts category that really sets him a world apart. But, keep in mind, not everyone has the sensitivity to appreciate this in his music. Those music listeners who are interested in only the obvious, the flashy, will not appreciate Rahman's finer compositions, the finer layers, the deeper sounds, the small ornaments. And the amazing thing about Rahman is that you cannot label or categorize him as only one type of composer. At the drop of a hat, he can create a racy, flashy piece of music that will send the charts on fire. In the next instant, he can wear Mozart's or John Williams' hats and create a Monet-esque or DaVinci-esque refined sound sculpture worthy of display in a future musical museum. Rahman is not just an entertainer, he is a true artist in the very finest sense of the term.
