I can relate to your feelings completely. However, I do think that AR Rahman, potentially, is miles ahead of any other composer in the Indian film industy. A R R told me recently that music production has become more time-consuming because every song has to be mastered in 5.1 and that it hurts productivity. There are all sorts of issues. Technical competition, as you point out, is very much a part of it. Many of the A R R "fans" here who cannot accept any criticism must not remember how profound the impacts of Roja, Thiruda Thiruda or Bombay were when they hit the market. My mind is too shrouded by nostalgia to objectively assess those albums as far as musical quality anymore. However most people who have seen those releases will agree that the impact was far greater than a Yuva or Guru in recent times. It is also doubtful whether this was due to a musical vacuum, espcially in Bollywood, since Nadeem Shravan, J-L etc., were in their peak as well, and were selling a lot more albums than Rahman. But what A R Rahman brought was completely different in musical style and arrangement, and broke all traditional barriers. He took out any instrumentation that sounded "cheesy" and relied on sound engineering and effects processing to tweak every little sound. Thematically, he went away from the common musical conceptions of emotions, and created fast beat-based songs that were sad, or slow songs with subtle instrumentation that were happy or cheerful. As I was discussing with Gopal Srinivasan recently, you watch the videos of songs from Pudhiya Mugham, May Maadham, Vandicholai Chinarasu and wonder how (or where) A R R got the inspiration to produce such beautiful music given the scanario. As I know him, he still tries to be the trendsetter. But people are exposed to so much these days, it is probably more difficult to create something impactful. Let's see what Jodha Akbar brings. It was nice to see an honest assessment from you. Good luck with your itwofs website; whenever I hear a terrific Bollywood song, I run to your site to check. -Ranojoy
--- In [email protected], "Karthik S" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > A small collection of thoughts about my interests' arc on A.R.Rahman's > music, on the eve of his completing 15 years in Indian film music. > > http://itwofs.com/milliblog/2007/08/12/15-years-of-arrahmans-music- 1992-to-2007-and-continuing/ >
