As an icon he cannot and will not do that. If he does that he would be sighning his own eclipse.
But, being Rahman he won’t go overboard doing it. He knows how to make lyrics and voices stand out too.
He is a clever musician who knows how to stand out. No Michael Jackson or Madonna of film music like A.R.Rahman. The songs became evergreen hits but the composers were behind-the-scenes technicians. Why would he slog all night hammering away at some elusive permutation of hit notes if the moolah wasn’t going to come to him?īut composers of the earlier era, whether Naushad of nearer home, Mahadevan and Viswanathan and Master Devarajan vindicated themselves by making poetic and situation-centric lyrics flower musically. But soon Rahman realized that his music and song should prioritise himself. The irony is that when Rahman landed on celluloid shore with Chinna Chinna Aasai and Chotti Si Aasha, marrying a happy lyric to the lilt of reggae, he was supposed to be giving the lyric its due place. Soft-spoken gentleman composer that he is, they could get king’s treatment.īut once the mixing is over and all the orchestration has been added, and the song comes out of the studio with all the different tracks put in one place, you would know that whoever is king, Rahman is the emperor. Not that he is going to bust the lyric writer or the singer. Rahman understood it long before and that is why he is India’s topmost pop musician.Ī single track of his may sell for crores…Can he afford to let a lyric writer carry the trophy home or a singer to chime to a million hearts if he, Rahman has to earn and keep the millions? Well, Rahman is a brand and no problem if Karnad doesn’t understand it, A. Karnad has been in a plainspeaking mode for some time, and after cutting Tagore to size on his plays he has set about putting Rahman in his place for stymieing the lyrical force of his songs.īut to fault Rahman for not being a Madan Mohan or a Naushad and not making romantic poetry leap through to the listener, or even not allowing a Rafi or a Lata to top the chart with ecstatic vocals is not to understand Rahman. Rahman’s music is overpowering but it also overpowers, well nigh obscures and even eclipses the lyric, has been his evaluation. Rahman, the double Oscar winning phenomenon with qualified praise (a different take on faint praise, I suppose).
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