Rahman is a composer with a staggering range
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Indian music director AR Rahman’s score for Slumdog Millionaire has won an Oscar for best music, and a second for best song. The BBC’s Soutik Biswas discusses what makes Rahman tick.
The curiously named Panchathan Record Inn is a nondescript building tucked away in the thriving film district of the southern Indian city of Madras (Chennai). The backyard music studio is also AR Rahman’s atelier.
“We make a lot of noise here,” one of Rahman’s assistants told me wryly when I paid a visit a few years ago. It was late in the evening, and trombone loops floated down the stairs from the state-of-the art studio above.
The “noise” has now conquered the world.
Seventeen years after he began writing music and songs for films, the jingle maker-turned-musician has finally got recognition as India’s first truly global film music composer with his score for Danny Boyle’s sleeper hit Slumdog Millionaire.
The score is an untidy smorgasbord of hip hop, Bollywood remix and signature pop anthem. But it works because it follows the film’s giddy pace, the darkness of its characters, its portrayal of lives on the edge.
Bollywood outsider
The golden statue is a global recognition of Rahman’s enormous talent.
Like many film composers, he is not a particularly gifted vocalist or a player. Rahman, instead, is an alchemist of sounds and voices, mixing and melting them in a potion that is usually a joy for the ear and soul.
It is not surprising then that he is a composer with a staggering range – from raga to reggae to hip hop to Indian rustbelt folk to jungle rhythms to faux baroque. All of it is brewed with an unerring feel for melody, swing and soul.
Rahman, who converted to Islam some 20 years ago, is also India’s – and Bollywood’s – first truly successful cross-over music director.
Bollywood has filched tunes from the West for as long as I can remember – check out rip-offs from Chuck Berry, The Beatles, swing jazz and vapid disco for many home-grown hit tunes since the 1950s. But Rahman is not your archetypal tune ripper; he is, instead, an intrepid fusion tunesmith.
Rahman says he is impressed with MIA’s music
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It helps that he remains the outsider in Bollywood – the world’s most incestuous film industry.
Rahman cut his teeth scoring music for southern Indian films in the Telugu and Tamil languages, before scoring for Bollywood. Even this year, he is working on several Tamil and Telugu films, and only two Hindi films.
And that is one of the reasons why the 43-year-old composer has often reached out to little-known new singers and musicians from all over the country to lend their voices and instruments to his songs and score.
Rahman is also globalisation’s favourite child, always abreast of the world music that is making waves. No wonder he discovered the music of MIA, aka Maya Arulpragasam, the war child turned feisty alternative rapper, who very few people in India had heard before Slumdog.
Rahman uses MIA’s Paper Planes – the singer rapping over a compelling sample riff and a rousing chorus line with gunshots and cash registers jingling in the background – in Slumdog.
“We met before but we never worked before,” he told one interviewer. “MIA, she’s a real powerhouse. Somebody played me her CD and I thought, who is this girl? She came here and knew all my work, had followed my work for ages. I said cut the crap, this ‘idol’ crap. You have to teach me. We started working in India, then we e-mailed the track back and forth. She did the vocals in England, I did the rest in India.”
Mixing old and new
I am now not surprised that the gritty girl rapper and the reclusive composer bonded so well. I met MIA a couple of years ago on the Jamaica seafront where she was shooting a music video for a new album. The boom box was playing her new song, a noisy mish-mash of what sounded like raucous Tamil gaana – a form of Tamil fast beat slum rap – over hip hop grooves. The Sri Lanka-born Tamil MIA and Rahman share some of the same culture.
The score for Roja was a limpid fusion of raga and reggae
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For the Slumdog score, Rahman says he was mixing the sounds of new and old India. But Slumdog is not even among his top five scores.
The songs and score for Roja (The Rose), a 1992 film directed by Mani Ratnam, is possibly his best and most consistent work to date.
A limpid fusion of raga and reggae, Roja was a breathtaking achievement for a composer taking his first steps in the intensely competitive world of Indian film music.
Working with a number of vocalists, the film’s music showcases his talents – fusing flutes, synthesisers and traditional melody to a reggae backbeat and a rolling bass line. Sometimes it felt like listening to The Wailers – Bob Marley’s iconic reggae band – playing to Indian vocals. Time magazine called it one of the top 10 movie soundtracks of all time.
From then on, there has been no stopping the Rahman revolution in Indian film music, his best work usually coming with Mani Ratnam, an MBA-turned-filmmaker.
On the Ratnam movie, Bombay, on love and longing in a city torn apart by religious rioting, Rahman’s offerings are again rich and varied – from a sweaty, breathless love song by Remo Fernandes to a child chorus ditty to a background score that highlights the bleakness of a city and its people broken by hatred and fighting.
And then, just to pick two films, come the pulsating baroque tunes and sounds in Ratnam’s Thiruda (Thief, thief) – my favourite Rahman soundtrack.
From there, Rahman travels to fusing swing jazz and smoky blues with pristine Carnatic classical in the political hero biopic, Iruvar, another Ratnam film.
There have been many good soundtracks and songs before and after these two films.
In the end, Rahman, like the best of Indian film music composers, is melody’s slave. At his place we had discussed the possibility of a rap musical some day. “I don’t think,” the alchemist frowned, “rap could sustain a two-hour musical!”
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