Rahman



It did not exactly start with the bass pitched rhythm of O…Saya but with the long, rustic humming as a background for the song about a village girl expressing her little mundane desires. When the song hit the town, everyone had sensed that their world has changed. Allah Rakha Rahman, became the musical icon of Reform Boomers, the generation that grew up post economic reforms. He was also the beneficiary of the opening of the floodgates of the economic reform but that is not the scope of this piece; it is about his music.

The difficulty in writing about Rahman is that almost anything one writes would end up sounding clichéd or trite because reams have been written and most of them in superlative register. When he began, Rahman, was widely criticised for computer generated feel of his music. His sound had a hollow bass echo and a sharp trebled output that kind of emitted an artificial feel. He either had songs heavily infused with rhythmic loops and percussions that made lyrics difficult to grasp, or quiet, hollow guitar tinged with clear vocals that belied the wholeness of a tune. Those were the days he was still working on his sound and not many knew that. Creating your own sound is especially difficult in an arena like Indian film music because you are writing music for a film and the designs have to be contained within the framework of the script. Nevertheless, with Rahman came a new breed of directors who celebrated creative freedom as enthusiastically as he did. They gave him grounds to perform freely and also had exciting projects that gave him opportunity to work on subjects other than love songs, which Rahman disliked but were the staple of Indian mainstream cinema. Thus came Lagaan, Bombay, Swades, Rang De Basanti, Meenaxi, etc.

With the creative freedom firmly assured, Rahman went onto experiment actively with his sound. He has a penchant for mixing musical genres to bring out sounds for the required mood. Thus he infused Qawwali for a love duet (Tere Bina), folk rock in Dylan’s style for an idealistic youth (Ru Ba Ru), western country style for an anti-war propaganda (Vellai Pookkal), and western classical in techno beat (Dil Ka Rishta), all of which generated greatly unique yet highly exciting sounds which the Reform Boomers enthusiastically relished. At the same time to silence his detractors, he also gave a break to his active fusion mixing habit and produced near pure genres such as classical bhajan (Man Mohana), pure Jazz (Jane Tu), Hindustani semi-classical (Sarfarosh Ki Tamanna), and lo and behold, even a clean Hindustani (Bore Mayi).

Jai Ho pales in comparison with such breathtaking portfolio but you can’t falter with Academy for not being aware of those works. You can only feel elated that the statute has gone to the right person. The fans of Rahman would know that though Jai Ho that sealed the coveted statute; it is the years of experimentation and sheer creative genius that actually brought him to that stage. Listen to Rehna Tu particularly. The reggae beat infused song introduces Rahman’s voice that traverses freely defying melodic conventions, brings in middle-eastern interlude and ends with a long flue solo based on Carnatic. That deserves an Oscar.