Thanks for this Pavan! It was an excellent read!!
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 8:12 AM, $ Pavan Kumar $ wrote:
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> http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090814/REVIEW/708139983/1007
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> God of score
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>- Last Updated: August 13. 2009 12:36PM UAE / August 13. 2009 8:36AM
>GMT
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> Jai ho! Rahman holds his Slumdog Millionare Oscars (Best Score and Best
> Original Song) at a post-award party in Los Angeles this February. Mario
> Anzuoni / Reuters
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> *In less than 20 years, AR Rahman has come to dominate Indian popular
> music by breaking all of its borders.* *S Subramanian** reads a new
> biography of Bollywood’s great assimilator.*
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> *AR Rahman: The Musical Storm *
> Kamini Mathai
> Penguin India
> Dh38
>
> The Indian composer AR Rahman, recent winner of a pair of Academy Awards
> for his jaunty songs in Slumdog Millionaire, has over the years demonstrated
> a keen talent for reaching new, rapidly appreciative audiences. This talent
> is typically discussed in reference to his work outside India, which began
> early this century when he collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the
> saccharine West End confection Bombay Dreams, pairing reworked versions of
> some of his most outstanding songs from the 1990s with some of his worst
> original music. Since then, his work has featured on Broadway and in Chinese
> and Hollywood films. All this, particularly the Slumdog Oscars, has made
> Rahman the first Indian composer to find substantial audiences beyond the
> already large world of his country’s film industry.
>
> But Rahman’s first, more impressive feat of border-crossing occurred much
> earlier, when he became the first Indian composer with a pan-Indian
> audience. So often is Bollywood used as a symbol of the entire Indian film
> industry that it is easy to overlook the country’s diversity of other
> regional cinema. Outside Mumbai, other sizeable film industries operate like
> self-contained planets, producing movies in the languages of Tamil, Telugu,
> Kannada, Malayalam and Bengali. The borders between the four south Indian
> cinemas are, for actors, directors and composers, particularly fluid; the
> border between south Indian cinema and Hindi cinema has, because of deeper
> linguistic differences, traditionally been far less permeable.
>
> Even music, that much-vaunted universal language, sat for long in decidedly
> regional compartments. The music of the Bollywood and Tamil film industries
> may have shared roots in the Indian seven-note scale, for instance, but they
> long ago developed into entirely different sensibilities. In their default
> modes, they leaned in different directions: Bollywood toward plaintive
> romantic or existential ballads; Tamil music toward raga-based classical or
> rhythm-heavy indigenous folk. They used different instruments: the harmonium
> would have sounded as odd in Tamil music as the veena in Bollywood. The gulf
> separating these genres was a wide one, spanned only by the occasional work
> of the occasional composer. Perhaps work on the bridge that now connects
> them had tentatively begun in the years before Rahman, but only after he
> brought power cranes to the job, completed its construction, and made a few
> sorties back and forth did other composers feel consistently comfortable
> doing the same.
>
> Rahman’s debut soundtrack, Roja, released in 1992, provides a classic
> example of how his music functions. A song will start simply, with a spare
> melody and vocals with power but no apparent ambition to blow the listener
> away. Within seconds, that all changes. The melody might enter a dense burst
> of orchestration, or yield to a solo by an unexpected instrument, or somehow
> reveal itself to be based on a highly classical raga. The vocals might shift
> colour, from modest to epic, or from normal singing to Rahman’s own
> free-spirited yodels, or from pristine enunciation to humming. The rhythm
> can come out of wood blocks, or steel drums, or something that sounds
> distinctly like a brass pot being hit with a bunched fist. Mixed together,
> this reminds you of reggae one minute, Tamil folk the next, then
> electronica, then south Indian classical – all together in one alluring
> whole.
>
> Nearly 20 years after that debut, Rahman’s music still sparks interesting
> (albeit well-worn) debates among music-lovers. What exactly is Rahman’s
> genius? Does it lie in his arrangements, his meticulous layering of sounds
> and voices as if they were sheets of phyllo? Or in his generous
> accommodation of styles, or in his industrious production of catchy hooks?
> In other words: is he “simply” a technically savvy producer of commercial
> music? Or do arrangement, stylistic flexibility and hook-production fall
> legitimately under the rubric of musical artistry, and is Rahman exactly
> what his legions of devoted fans say he is: a straight-up compositional
> genius?
>
> Kamini Mathai’s AR Rahman: The Musical Storm refuses to engage Rahma
