http://www.desipundit.com/baradwajrangan/2009/03/12/ar-rahman-the-road-to-the-oscars/
HOW COULD AR RAHMAN BECOME THE FIRST Indian musician to hold an Oscar? This
rhetorical question arises from the signs, over the years, that if the genius
from Chennai found his way to global recognition, it would be through the
Grammies. That was the international award I thought he'd win first, this
restless pop-rock explorer whose far-flung voyages of musical introspection
have consistently reshaped the landscape of the film song. There was the
unmatched finish in his albums, for instance the kind of sonic spit-polish
we've encountered only in international records. Then there were the influences
that shaped Rahman Osibisa, Jim Reeves, Switched-On Bach, Chick Corea,
Vangelis and Dave Grusin, none of which appear, at least at first glance,
capable of being co-opted into the traditional five-minute film song.
Even Rahman's early days the days leading up to August 1992, when the sounds
of Roja exploded in Tamil Nadu, causing fissures and cracks in the existing
compositional model (the symphonic orchestral model, exemplified by the
monolithic might of Ilayaraja), and the eventual breaking away of a new musical
subcontinent pointed not so much towards a film composer as some sort of
incipient rock star. First, Rahman's classmates roped him into a band for
inter-school cultural competitions, introducing him to rock and Deep Purple and
Pink Floyd. Then came Roots, the band Rahman formed with musicians like
Sivamani, where he procured a sequencing gear and began to compose experimental
pieces. Then L Shankar came calling, asking Rahman to back his band, Epidemics.
Rahman even complained to Rolling Stone, a little more than a year ago, about
the lack of opportunity in the pre-Roja days, coming off like a sweaty little
man whose palms were callused from pushing against a giant boulder. "It was
frustrating. It was only film music. To liberate yourself from this and go to
another space was impossible. A normal person would never relate to what we
wanted to play." And look at him now, cradling two Academy Awards in his arms
in the manner of a proud father posing with newborn twins. It's still only
"film music" but he has liberated it and gone into the other space he so
desired, the global pop-rock space. And, miracle of miracles, the "normal
people" he referred to, those happy, willing slaves to traditional models of
film music, have snapped their shackles. They now wave cigarette lighters in
unison with Rahman's rhythms.
I would be lying if I said I saw this moment. It was the eighties. Hindi film
music was, for a large part, stricken by drought. But down in Tamil Nadu, the
decade was marked by a ceaseless downpour, thanks to Ilayaraja, a benevolent
monarch who doled out musical riches to his subjects with unstinting largesse.
And yet, there was a question that hovered in the air unasked, unanswered. MS
Viswanathan, the magician before Ilayaraja, sprinkled fairy dust on the melody
line, causing it to burst into miraculous shapes and forms. Ilayaraja,
subsequently, breathed life into the interstices. With his staggering gift for
arrangement, he ensured that no part of a song was left untended, even the
parts behind the vocals, and especially the parts between the stanzas. So the
question we were asking even if we weren't aware, then, that we were asking
it is what else could be done with the film song.
With his breakthrough in Roja, Rahman answered that question. And he did so by
reshaping the dynamics of the acoustics, something that could never have been
done in the era of live recording. The sound just before Rahman (that is,
Ilayaraja's sound) was characterised by weight, by the twinning of a melody
line with a contrapuntal groove. Rahman's sound, on the other hand, was the
very definition of lightness. It was as if the tune was floating in an amnion
of ambient music, as if the melody lines were freed from instrumental
underpinnings and this weight was redistributed in the surroundings. It was as
if the very atmosphere were aquiver with sound. No one had heard anything like
it not in Tamil Nadu, and not in India, as Roja went on to enslave a nation.
It was a young sound, a modern sound, and though we didn't know it then a
global sound, even if, for a while, it appeared that Rahman's music could only
be cotton candy, spun sugar that's sweet on the ears but with barely any
nutrition. There was, for instance, Kangalil enna eeramo (Uzhavan, 1993), where
the soaring melody lines were tethered to a bouncy, pizzicato percussion, or
Usilampatti penkutti (Gentleman, 1993), where Rahman proved that it was
possible to rustle up a rustic ambience without invoking Ilayaraja. These were
beautiful numbers, but they did not especially point towards a composer capable
of true greatness. There was something almost antiseptic about these songs
they were too refined, too polished, too perfect. We loved these songs because
they were a welcome change, but little did we suspect that Rahman was just
warming up.
In 1995, with Rangeela, Rahman accomplished something no composer from the
South had he successfully crossed over to Hindi cinema with a set of original
compositions. A number like Kya kare kya na kare, for instance, sat perfectly
in a Mumbai milieu, empathetically tuned to the tossed-off angst of a tapori
torn between being in love and admitting to being in love. And back home,
Rahman was dazzling fans with his facility with symphonic arrangements in
Strawberry kanne (Minsaara Kanavu, 1997), whose operetta texture was just right
for the onscreen battle-of-the-sexes banter and even swing jazz, in Kannai
katti kollaadhey (Iruvar, 1997). With the irresistible guitar riffs that kicked
off the latter, and the delightful percussion that changed colour on alternate
sets of a four-count beat, the thundering chorus Viduthalai ("Freedom")
appeared to be a triumphant cry of liberation from traditional modes of
creating film music.
And then, sometime towards the end of nineties, Rahman's music began to achieve
the kind of burnished glow that only comes from the perfect balance of personal
creativity and public satisfaction. Overnight, the composer got rid of the
awkward pauses that would sometimes bring the mood of a song to a grinding halt
(the suspended-in-time sitar strains after the mukhda of Pyaar yeh in Rangeela,
for instance). He ironed out his tune transitions. He smoothened out his
interludes, the one thing he never appeared to give much thought to earlier. I
still recall how startled I was by the astounding Jiya jale (Dil Se, 1998),
where a plaintive sarangi bracketed the opening line of the antara without
interrupting for a second the rhythm of the piece, or Rut aa gayi re (1947
Earth, 1998), whose magnificent second interlude bristled with
borderline-menacing strings that evoked Prokofiev's Montagues and Capulets.
And where Rahman's earlier numbers were (mostly) merely catchy and fun, his
work at this point became gifts that kept on giving. Each time you heard a
song, you'd unearth a new layer, and yet, if you didn't want to dig all that
much, they were still well catchy and fun on the surface, which translated
to off-the-charts popularity. And there was always a balance. For every upbeat
Kahin aag lage (Taal, 1999), there was a wistful Nahin saamne, with a gentle
tom-tom rhythm adding to the melancholia, as if even the percussion were too
drained for anything more animated, and if playfulness marked the mood of
Kaadhal sadugudu (Alaipaayuthey, 2000), the ticking heart of the film was
contained in Snehidhane, where Rahman poured his soul into delineating the
sweet sorrow inherent in a relationship where man and woman were united by
marriage and yet separated by distance.
And now, it appears Rahman has completed his transition to the other extreme,
with albums that are increasingly more personal, more idiosyncratic, and,
therefore, infinitely more fascinating. Towards the end of Barso re (Guru,
2007), the low-throbbing hum of a lightsabre made an unexpected appearance, and
in Style (Sivaji: The Boss, 2007) an instance of Rahman's experimentation at
its eccentric best the mood was as if an eighties electro-pop band like
Kraftwerk were slowed down to a crawl and layered with raucous bursts of
hip-hop before the whole thing were rendered in Japanese (thanks to the
layering of the lyrics, which were all but incomprehensible). There's very
little in his music that's instantly catchy and fun anymore, because Rahman is
no longer just making soundtracks; he's painting soundscapes.
Over the years, our concept of the Film Album has been a collection of songs of
five to six different moods, and the skill of the composers was revealed in the
way they worked around these limitations. It's not that they never
experimented, but these experimentations seldom interfered with the surface of
the song and so the casual listener still came away with something to hum
after one round of radio play. But Rahman doesn't seem to care about any of
this which is really the only way for a pure musician to work. (Of course,
you could argue that a music director for a movie can't afford to be a "pure
musician," and you would be right in a way.) The sound of Rahman, today, is the
sound of a musician trying to break free. (Now you see why I thought he'd bring
home a Grammy, rather than two Oscars?)
And that's why, unsurprisingly, the only constant of a Rahman album is the
difference. In one youthful romance, you could get a sprightly sparkler of a
love song, something relatively traditional like Kabhi kabhi Aditi (Jaane Tu Ya
Jaane Na, 2008), whose surprise lies mainly in the rhythm, which kicks in like
an afterthought, well into the second line, changing, in an instant, the
texture of a number that you thought was going to be coloured primarily by
whiny pickings on an acoustic guitar. Whereas in another youthful romance,
Rahman could spring, out of nowhere, a song like Paravaigal seyyudhe (Sillunu
Oru Kadhal, 2006), setting the words to spunky, sprightly, bite-sized bebop
riffs, as if a brassier version of his own Vennila (Iruvar) were routed through
Dizzy Gillespie's Oh-Sho-Be-Do-Be.
Even when Rahman's music isn't what you expect, even when it doesn't find its
way to that sweet spot, you almost always catch a whiff of creative
restlessness, that refusal to settle for easy reconfigurations of past hits
when that could be all that the marketplace demands and in that respect, he
is the true successor of RD Burman, another restless experimenter whose sound
defied the sameness of much of his competition. That's why it's surprising that
Time labelled Rahman the Mozart of Madras, instead of going with someone like
Schoenberg to pick a name out of the classical music canon who did much to
veer music away from pre-established styles. That is Rahman's great
achievement, that he pioneered a style that's entirely his own.
Rahman finished what RD Burman began, but couldn't complete because of the
times he lived in. One of the reasons Rahman's genius has shone through so
unfettered is that he arrived on the musical scene when the country was
expanding, when the world was shrinking, and when he could be exactly who he
wanted to be without worrying if enough listeners would get his music whether
in the North or in the South. During the age of MSV and Ilayaraja, Tamil film
music was for Tamil Nadu and the Tamils scattered worldwide. Very few
non-Tamils had a clue what this music was all about because the film industry,
the music industry, the country, and indeed the world, was split up into
isolated pockets of locally consumed culture.
The audience for the music of those older composers was a vertical
cross-section of Tamil Nadu, percolating from the cities downwards to the tiny
little outposts, and it is a mark of the genius of MSV and Ilayaraja that they
were able to incorporate so many sounds and so many genres into their music,
while still satisfying what you'd call the least-common-denominator listener,
the Tamil equivalent of someone from the North who tapped his feet to massy
Laxmikant-Pyarelal numbers. But today, thanks to the Internet and a gaggle of
news channels traversing the breadth of the nation in search of stories can
you imagine a Tamil masala movie named Sivaji, starring a Tamil hero named
Rajinikanth, becoming a nationwide sensation even ten years ago? the world is
clued into what is happening at our doorsteps, and when we raised a toast to
Rahman, it was only a matter of time before rest of the nation, and
subsequently the world did too.
Rahman is the product of a generation that never existed earlier the global
Tamilian, if you will, and by extension, the global Indian. And when it came to
the "sound" of his music rooted yet not specifically so, Indian yet not
alienatingly so he had the extraordinary latitude of not having to depend on
the earlier top-down model, the vertical model of listeners inside a state. He
could, instead, get the same numbers of listeners (and perhaps more) thanks to
a horizontal model, spread out across the surface, the cream, the upper crust
of the state, the country and the world. He can, today, afford to appeal only
to the equivalent of the consumers of multiplex movies. Because even if there
aren't enough buyers for his kind of global music think Hey, goodbye nanba
(Aayitha Ezhuthu, 2004) inside Tamil Nadu, the numbers are more than made up
for by music enthusiasts across the country, and around the world.
This global market has allowed Rahman to experiment with his sound, and it has
allowed his genius to unfurl on his terms. Today, Rahman need not concern
himself about the pan-Indian viability of to take an example from his
outstanding soundtrack for Delhi-6, released this February the
Sting-meets-Steely Dan ethos of Rehna tu. This is a global sound that is not
going to find favour in the interiors of an India whose films (at least from
Bollywood) have increasingly oriented themselves towards the tastes of upscale
urbanites and Rahman wouldn't have been able to put out such a tune, say,
twenty years ago. (Even if he wanted to, the director would have balked.) Such
phenomenal freedom to do exactly what one wants to do, and to be accepted and
celebrated for the same is a consequence of the global age Rahman is in.
Before Rahman, when composers wanted to stretch, when they wanted to exercise
the muscles atrophied by the monotony of film music, they branched out into
non-film albums. In the mid-eighties, for instance, Ilayaraja came out with How
To Name It and Nothing But Wind, and RD Burman collaborated with Jose Flores on
Pantera. But today, (multiplex) Bollywood has become so experimental that
Rahman can explore non-film-style music within the context of a film album. I
suspect an interesting trend will emerge if we move away from the cities and
conduct polls on the kind of music the people in the interiors are really
swaying to. I doubt, for instance, that they would have the patience or the
inclination to subscribe to the famous dictum of needing repeated listenings to
get someone's music but the fact is that Rahman doesn't need to factor these
considerations into his compositions. He can just be himself.
The evolution of Bollywood is the other factor that has aided the evolution of
Rahman. Considering that he is among the most collaborative of composers, the
most accepting of the humbling notion that one needn't always know everything,
it is fortunate that a significant portion of his energies are channelled
towards gilding the visions of Bollywood filmmakers who are ambitious, who
understand the value Rahman brings to their films, and who do not mind giving
him the space and the time and the collaborative creative inputs to bring out
the best in him. Where a composer from an earlier era may have burned out
because of having to conjure up, for the millionth time, a generic love song or
a generic estrangement number, these directors have kept Rahman's creative
fires burning.
Then, of course, there's the dizzying panoply of technology that's taken for
granted today, which has helped the recording style become a part of Rahman's
sound. Earlier, the tabla was just a tabla, and a voice was available in just
one timbre. But today, a tabla is simply an input for a console that can render
it practically unrecognisable, practically a spanking new instrument. The
composer can, quite literally, play God and no song need ever sound like an
earlier one any more. In Masakkali (the hit track from Delhi-6), for instance,
there's a periodic flight of violins, which adds a fantastic, out-of-nowhere
texture to the number. But it's not violins. It's not a full-bodied
string-section sound, in that it's been tempered (and tampered with), using
technology. Rahman's vocabulary and by extension, the vocabulary of those who
followed is completely different from that of earlier composers from the
live-music generation (and subsequently, more in tune with a global market).
There's, of course, a flip side to this global sound, and that's that everyone
in the globe has access to its building blocks, something that Rahman
acknowledged while speaking to Rolling Stone. "[At the time of Roja], that
sound was just mine. Now people are sharing that sound. So to do something is
not just about a different sound anymore." Perhaps inevitably, today, the lines
between the top composers (Rahman, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Vishal-Shekhar) are
increasingly beginning to blur. When the compositional style is "Indian," it's
easier to identify, say, Arziyaan (Delhi-6) as a Rahman creation, for no other
composer whips up such a spiritual fervour. But it becomes murkier when we're
talking pop-style compositions like Kabhi kabhi Aditi, or Kahin to hogi (also
from Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, which sounded like a throwback to eighties' acts
like Paul Young and Peter Cetera).
But Rahman's best compositions are uniquely his, if only for the dense (and
daringly ingenious) layering. In another approach to his craft that is light
years distanced from those before him (where the entire composition needed to
be envisioned in advance), Rahman approaches music like an editor would
approach a movie, or a precocious child a Lego set. He records all the takes,
picks what he wants, and splices the bits into the final composition. It is,
perhaps, no accident that AR Rahman is the first Indian musician to get global
recognition because his is the first instance of a truly global sound, from
global processes engineered with global technology. Earlier, in the case of
pioneers, the oft-employed cliché was East-meets-West, but the genius of Rahman
is that, in his hands, East is West. The twain has met.
Rahman is a composer who's always two steps ahead of technology, so the
workings of his phenomenal mind will always find more creative modes of
expression. The future, therefore, looks limitless. With those Oscars in hand,
he could find doors opening for him in Hollywood. But it is still the
traditional symphonic score that drives most Western films, so Rahman could do
worse than seek out a few "non-exotic" projects, so that he doesn't become the
go-to guy only when a "Bollywood-style" Jai Ho number is required. But all that
can wait. Let's just savour his win for now. This is a moment that's not likely
to be repeated in our lifetime, at least not through projects made within our
country. The wise minds that submit our films for Oscar consideration (in the
foreign film category) routinely place their bets on losers, so even that
solitary Oscar doesn't look likely. And this only makes Rahman's double win
more special a global recognition for a truly global musician.
