Rahman Scores Slumdog is not a B'wood musical. So it's unfair to expect sizzling pop hits from Rahman. ... Ajith Pillai | e-mail | one page format | feedback: send | Commercial cinema in India also doubles up as MTV. For decades, it has served as a platform to showcase pop music. Which is perhaps why a film score is judged by the number of hit songs a music director spins out in the course of a film. Very often the tracksusually upbeat/ downbeat love songs with a catchy or heart-rending hookare released before the completion of a film. The success of the soundtrack often determines the box-office prospects of the film.
Given this backdrop, it's understandable why many are surprised at the accolades being showered on A.R. Slumdog is not a B'wood musical. So it's unfair to expect sizzling pop hits from Rahman. Rahman for the music of Slumdog Millionaire. Hasn't he given us better hits in Kadalan or Jodhaa Akbar is the common refrain. Perhaps he has. But chart-topping ditties alone do not make a good film score. The music has to be seen in totality with the film. Does it embellish and thread the storyline? Is it in sync with the overall theme? A film score (background music as opposed to songs forming the soundtrack) is meant to convey the period and place in which the story is set. Crucially, it's supposed to reflect the range of emotions and energy that the filmmaker wishes to convey on screen. Rahman has delivered on all these counts, which is why director Danny Boyle has given him full marks for the music. And this praise came much before the Golden Globe and other awards. The music for Boyle's film works because it dovetails well with the narrative structure and characters. The fusion of western and Indian classical with folk, European house and hip hop has produced an unobtrusive yet dynamic and contemporary synthesis which has an international resonance. Very clearly, he has worked in close conjunction with Boyle who has ensured at the edit table that the music is put to good usenever overstated. Slumdog's score has been well thought out note for note. The approach is different from that of Bollywood music directors who wash their hands of a film once they've composed the hits. The rest of the score is left to minions or outsourced from musicians who run home studios and are desperate for work. With the music director not directly involved, the final cut ends up having cliched passages of sound put together with orchestral samples. Boyle has used only snatches of the songsthe only full-length track (Jai Ho) comes when the credits roll out at the end. Would Rahman have done better if he had imposed a clutch of hits on the film? And would the director have allowed his film to be messed up with one song after the other? Given the tightness of the plot, there was obviously no space to stop the story in its tracks and cut from the slums of Mumbai to the tulip fields outside Amsterdam for an S&D sequence. In fact, if Boyle had used this Bollywood formula, the film would have run the risk of becoming long-drawn and soporific. Slumdog Millionaire is not a musical in the Bollywood tradition. So it would be unfair to expect sizzling pop hits from Rahman. That was not his brief. The fact that Jai Ho has become a hit is incidental. When Paul McCartney was asked to score for The Family Way in the '60s he went into the studios and produced orchestral and choral music without a single pop vocal track. He didn't think the film required it. Incidentally, no one compared his work with what he had done for the Beatles. http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20090223&fname=Dev+D+%28F%29&sid=2