http://www.counterpunch.org/yearsley03062009.html
The Musical Patriot
Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai
By DAVID YEARSLEY
A. R. Rahman’s two-fisted Oscar haul a couple of weeks ago was richly
deserved. Without his soundtrack, Slumdog Millionaire would have been largely
unwatchable. It was the palliative of Rahman’s score that allowed the movie’s
grim images of poverty and violence to be served up as entertainment. Even
more skillful and necessary was the way his music energized the film’s central
conceit—Redemption by Game Show—with a kind of urgency and excitement that the
narrative nonsense itself could hardly sustain.
Rahman was already a commercial phenomenon of global significance before his
marketability went stratospheric thanks to Hollywood’s rituals of shameless
hype. His soundtrack sales had surged past the 100 million mark only a decade
after he began scoring films in Indian in the early 1990s.Brisk business on
iTunes, where the soundtrack became the top-selling album in the days following
its Oscar victories and high billboard rankings, are music to the ears of the
Mozart of Madras. Rahman was so-dubbed by Time Magazine in one of the silliest
appropriations of the diminutive Austrian’s brand power since they started
wrapping those little marzipan balls covered in chocolate with his (Mozart’s,
not Rahman’s) bewigged head.
To his credit Rahman, a seemingly modest and likable fellow, acknowledged the
arbitrariness of industry awards, especially the infamously fickle and foolish
Oscar. On his triumphant return to India last week Rahman was asked to comment
on the fact that his musical guru, Ilayairaaja, has never been recognized by
Hollywood’s dubious Academy. “Ilaiyaraaja sir and his music are beyond the
Oscar limits. The international music community knows the supremacy of Raja sir
in Indian film music. He has already proved his talents through symphony and
Thiruvasagam oratorio. So there is no need to compare him with just winning
some award.” Who needs the Oscar when one reigns supreme in India? Composer of
a staggering 850 film scores and some 5,000 songs over a thirty year career,
Illaiyaraaja has raked in many Indian film awards but never the mother lode
from California’s distant shores.
Rahman’s productivity is nearly as impressive. Last year alone saw the release
of seven films for which he provided the music. Slumdog Millionaire was his
only English-language movie though the opening section is in Hindi. Surrounded
by keyboards, Rahman often works on a half dozen soundtracks at the same time.
This year ten films are moored at his musical dock ready to take on his cargo
of high-energy synthesizer sound inflected with Indian rhythms, and various
Asian and world music melodic touches. The Slumdog Millionaire resonates with a
facile spirituality thanks to Rahman’s abundant use of the human voice put
through slick echo effects and kindred “enhancements.” Here’s betting that
cinematic freighters from across the world will seen lining up in the Bay of
Bengal for product from Rahman’s Chennai studios, said to be the most advanced
in Asia. Rahman’s music is highly produced, highly packaged, and highly
effective: his is the sound of India’s high tech transformation. One could
almost imagine after seeing this film that the class and religious divisions of
Indian it depicts could be dissolved by this soundtrack alone.
The fast-paced often jerky visual style of Slumdog Millionaire, self-conciously
influenced by music videos, already presents events on screen as comfortingly
fictional, even fantastical. The squalor of the slums is never to be confused
with the real thing, even if the movie is shot on location. With its chugging
drum beat, reverb-enhanced tenor incantations over a shimmering synthesizer
haze wafting past like incense, the opening music imbues the proceedings with a
mythic quality from the start. The soundtrack confirms that the unsteady camera
is not that of the documentary-filmmaker but of the fiction-maker. Thanks to
this repetitive, hypnotic music saturated in longing and possibility, we always
know we are in safe hands. Our time in the slums, in the interrogation rooms,
in the gangster palaces, cesspools, customer service phone centers, and Who
Wants to Be A Millionairestudio will never be too unsettling. The film’s
excursions into faux
realism never threaten cinema verité.
Brutality in the film is always softened by music, even when that music is
pumped up on adrenaline. With the rush of Hindu fanatics across the train
tracks to our child protagonist’s slum in the early phase of the film we again
hear the locomotive action of Rahman’s music, this time with syncopated drum
beats, portentous throbbing in the middle range of the texture, and chromatic
tinges from the keyboard. This music presages doom while promising to avert it.
The soundtrack not only readies as for the killing of our hero Jamal’s mother
but assures us that the partially slow-mo massacre about to be staged for our
benefit will be pantomime, reenactment, a necessary plot point with a whiff of
pathos. The soundtrack lets us know both what to expect and that it won’t be
too horrible to watch. Yes, we are in for a few minor jolts, but they are about
as inconvenient and unthreatening as those Jamal gets while being “tortured” by
the police for
allegedly cheating on the game show. In the massacre the visual style
aestheticizes the violence into harmlessness. For its part the music provides
the images with the aura of manageable terror even while assuring us that the
force and surety of Rahman’s beat will pull us through the savagery. Let the
massacre scene run in real time and without music and watch the theatre empty.
The funky track that springs Jamal and his bad brother, Salim, from the
villians’ lair running a begging ring, also gives the game away. Thanks to
Rahman’s mastery of the tonalities of easy excitement there’s never a doubt we
are watching kids in a disco-fairy tale rather than desperate children—or even
desperate characters—running for their lives. Similarly, Rahman helps convert
a harrowing fall from a train, with Jamal being dangled by his brother from
atop the carriage by a rope around his feet, into a swashbuckling romp rather
than the deadly accident it most certainly would have been. Throughout the
movie’s two hours Rahman’s music provides the aural anesthetic to the dangers
implied, if never honestly confronted, by the images. The soundtrack’s numbing
energy is that of a video game rather than evocative of the unpredictable and
menacing obstacles that the film consistently and opportunistically evades.
Even the long and
devastating shots of the Mumbai slums we see when the boys return to their
home city so that Jamal can find the love of his life, still in the clutches of
the bad guys, are given the sonic airbrush by Rahman’s music. All is about as
threatening as an issue of National Geographic.
The overlap in musical styles between the Millionaire game show theme and
Rahman’s other synthesized action strains is only one of many clues that the
unbridled fantasy of instant riches, paid off big time and with utter
predictably at the end of the movie, is hovering over the slums from the very
beginning of the movie. Though the music occasionally gestures towards the
monumental, this is not an epic: the happy end is always just around the
corner.
The closing Bollywood dance number staged during the credits releases the true
inner urges of the film towards the escapism of musical revue. The whole film
is like a jack-in-the-box: spurred on by the music, it winds itself up, but it
is really no surprise when the clown finally pops out. The denouement reunites
Latika and Jamal in a train station. At the head of hundreds of dancers
gathered behind them on the platform they work out a simple and cheery
choreography to Rahman’s song, “Jai Ho.” For this giddy masterpiece Rahman got
the Oscar for best original song; both its music and lyrics are his. Not even
music and lyrics great Cole Porter, four times nominated for the best original
song award, could bring home that bacon.
“Jai Hoi” draws together the optimistic and comforting strains of the
soundtrack as a whole into a final burst of euphoria. The lyrics are a jumble
of sentimental images like “I counted the stars till my finger burned.” The
music , too, is a heart-warming mix of world music flourishes, disco energy,
buoyant synthesizer countermelodies, and full-throated crooning above yearning
harmonic shifts. The final number is not simply a generic nod to Indian film
traditions, and the fact that the filmmakers use the credits as a cover for
what might superficially seem to be a sudden escape from the supposed
imperatives of believability cannot disguise the truth about this movie and its
music. The finale confirms what the screen has been telling our eyes and the
music our ears for two hours: that even miserable poverty can be overcome by a
bright lights and a techno beat and that redemption is always only one
high-tech hymn away.
David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the
Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of
Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from
Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at
d...@cornell.edu