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the
people who made a difference
India Today featured "1994: the people who made a difference."
Rahman was the featured one in the music department. Here is the article
on him... ( Rahman watchers note the Govind Nihalani part)
For close to two decades, Tamil Pop and film scores meant mostly
Ilaiyaraaja. It was easy, he never really had any competition. Till a
25-year old who prefers untrained voices to silky smooth renditions and
breathing space between beats to typical many-layered, cramped
orchestration came along. Now, two years later, A.R.Rahman looks like he
is here to stay, with his digitalised sound based on pop-rock and reggae
and fused with traditional Indian-mainly Carnatic-folk idioms. The
supreme irony: he used to play keyboards in Ilaiyaraja's orchestra. Says
Gangai Amaran, a music director and Ilaiyaraja's brother:"Rahman's
music is of the computer age. It is digital, but intelligent, not just
noise. He concentrates on his melody and has not deviated totally from
Carnatic traditions." What he has done, though, is deviated totally
from the norm and rung up hit score after hit track, moving near
effortlessly from the Tamil scene to take over Hindi film music. And
spawned on the way a whole new approach that is finding imitators
countrywide. Even before the Hindi version of director Mani Ratnam's
Tamil film Roja hit the screens last year - in a way, Rahman can be a
called a Ratnam discovery, spotted by him as a promising composer even
against the backdrop of Ilaiyaraja's elaborate orchestration - the sound
track and songs were churning cash registers. They helped sell over 25
lakh tapes. Bollywood director Subhash Ghai has replaced
Laxmikant-Pyarelal with Rahman for his next project, and pre-release has
sold the sound track for a figure of Rs.1 crore, very respectable by
industry standards. Art film maestro Govind Nihalani has also signed him
on. And Ratnam has banked on Rahman's earlier magic with Roja to sell
the sound track for his soon to be released Bombay for Rs.80 lakh.
Rahman, a former jingle composer, works to exacting standards of
quality, but is also an inveterate risk-taker. For Roja, he used the
quavering voices of old women to great effect, and for the now famous
title track, the non-filmi, pop voices of Baba Sehgal and Shweta Shetty.
For Chikkubukku raile, a Tamil hit song, he banked on an unknown voice,
its lisp and anglicised delivery. Rahman likes working with untrained
voices, saying a slight "defect in the singing adds a human
touch." A workable quirk? Typically, critics say that like other
music trends, Rahman and his mood music will also fade away. He hopes to
delay that by changing and offering new sounds, and staying relatively
exclusive by accepting no more than five film projects a year. The fact
is that it could take a Rahman to replace a Rahman. Few are likely to
complain.
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