The interview which appears below, was originally published by Richard Corliss on Time in January 2005. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
My job description — the critic — suggests that I’m here to criticize, point out mistakes in movies and shows, and pull the wings off works of art to keep them from flying. But there’s a missionary impulse in those of us who write about entertainment. We’re the Murine of journalism: we want to open your eyes to see what you might have missed in familiar pop culture. We also want you to see estimable works that don’t get the publicity or endorsements that might persuade you to seek them out.
Every 20 years or so, I get missionary about a Broadway show — to be exact, about the music I love in a certain Broadway show. In the 80s the show was Chess, with book and lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, late of the Swedish pop group ABBA. For me, Chess was by far the finest score of the decade, rich and varied and powerful, and thrillingly melodic. It put tunes in my head that still sit up and sing there.
In TIME, I wrote about Chess when it was still an album, a year before it was staged in London and three years before a revised version limped onto Broadway. Limped off, too, a couple of months later. The show closed, and Chess resumed its ideal form: an album full of great songs and stinging or surging passions.
In 2002, enlightenment struck again. I saw — heard, rather — the West End show Bombay Dreams. Like Chess, it had music by a composer who had written (and sometimes performed) dozens of pop hits. Indeed, A.R. Rahman is not just India’s most prominent movie songwriter — in a land of a billion people where movie music truly is popular music — but, by some computations, the best-selling recording artist in history. His scores have sold more albums than Elvis or the Beatles or all the Jacksons: perhaps 150 million, maybe more.
As Rahman explained it to TIME’s Lina Lofaro for a story we did last April when Bombay Dreams opened on Broadway, “If you have one big hit in India, it will sell more than 5 or 6 million. I’ve done over 70 movies of which more than 20, 25 were really big hits. And the rest of them are musical hits. The soundtracks sell very well. It’s a calculation of all that stuff. Each film I do is in three different languages. Tamil soundtracks sell probably half a million, Telegu sells probably 1 million, Hindi is like more than 6 or 7 million.” He added: “In India, we don’t get royalties. Otherwise, I’d be a very rich man. I wouldn’t have to come to America!
But come to America Rahman did, knowing that the country was unfamiliar not only with his name and achievements but with South Asian musical vocabulary. That didn’t faze him; he’d united disparate cultures before. “When I started in ‘92,” he told Lina, “Indian film music was very segmented. This made me take a film song and produce it in such a way that it would go beyond language or culture. That worked because, basically, I’m from South India [the Tamil capital of Madras]. It worked across North India [Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi, etc.], which is a completely different culture. And the same formula worked with the London audience” for Bombay Dreams.
Dream-Bay Bomb
Again I wrote about the music that has captured and transported me; I said that “anyone with half an ear will hear the most vibrant, varied new score in ages. Audiences will walk out of Bombay Dreams humming Rahman’s songs and singing his praises. If music is the crucial part of a musical, then Rahman’s genius will ensure that Bollywood conquers Broadway.” Again I hoped that a show might be successful, and that its songs click with listeners, and broaden our currently cramped musical lexicon.
Rahman himself expressed optimism that people in the U.S. would open their ears to his beautiful music and, by extension, India’s. “I think it’s the right time,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity for American audiences to know another culture, musically and spiritually.”
Well, no. The show, budgeted at an outsize $14 million, received weak reviews (“A monochromatic musical in the key of beige.” —Ben Brantley, New York Times). Rahman didn’t get a Tony award, or even a nomination, for his music — the finest, broadest score in ages wasn’t deemed one of the best four on Broadway last season! (Out of a total of about seven.) The Indo-American audience wasn’t large enough to keep it afloat, and it didn’t attract the idle non-Desi curious. Inserting American Idol notoriety Tamyra Gray did little to pump up the gross. Bombay Dreams ran only eight months and closes today, Jan. 1.
As I’ve written often in this space, it’s been ages since the mass of Americans took interest in music (or literature or movies) beyond our borders. It’s not that we’re xenophobic; in our cultural complacence we’re myopic. We make the biggest hits and have the biggest stars. Who cares what goes on in Europe or Asia or Latin America? So again, with Bombay Dreams, I failed; the music didn’t take hold. Not Mission Accomplished but Mission Impossible.
Who is A.R. Rahman?
Fans of Indian movies need no introduction to Rahman. Like Gershwin, Puccini or Lennon-McCartney, the name stands for melody, quality, energy, instant hummability — a sound both personal and universal, devouring older forms and transforming them into something gorgeously new.
His biography is dramatic enough for a Bollywood epic: poor boy loses dad, hits the road, studies at Oxford, becomes star! He was born in Madras, on January 6, 1966, with a Bollywood star’s soundalike name, A.S. Dileep Kumar. His musician father died when the boy was nine, and to support his family this precocious child left home to become a touring tyro musician with tabla maestro Zakir Hussain.
In 1988, according to the website Chalo Cinema, “one of his sisters fell seriously ill and numerous attempts to cure her failed. Her condition progressively worsened. The family had given up all hope when they came in contact with a Muslim Pir — Sheik Abdul Qadir Jeelani or Pir Qadri as he was popularly known. With his prayers and blessings, Dileep’s sister made a miraculous recovery. Rattled by the bad experience and influenced by the teachings of the Pir, the entire family converted to Islam. Thus A.S.Dileep Kumar became Allah Rakha Rahman.”
He studied music at Oxford and returned to Madras to join an ad agency. He wrote some 300 jingles — short songs for radio and TV commercials — winning several industry awards. At one ceremony he met top Tamil director Mani Ratnam, who chose Rahman, then 26, to be the musical director of the movie Roja. Scoring an Indian film means writing the songs (with a lyricist) as well as composing and conducting the background music. Rahman proved a master of it all. His songs were recognizably Indian but paraded a world of musical influences, from raga to reggae, from Broadway to Ennio Morricone, with each tune heightening the film’s drama.
Rahman’s lyrical prodigality was evident from his first score for his first film. Roja is the tale of a woman whose lover is kidnapped by terrorists. Through this grim political parable, Rahman laced some spectacular melodies that not only serve the drama, but they also create their own — as in the duet ballads Yeh Haseen Vadiyan and Roja Jaaneman, which first are grounded in recitative, then suddenly ascend into celestial melody. Either one could be a top 40 hit in a more enlightened American pop era. The soundtrack parades the composer’s gift for alchemizing outside influences until they are totally Tamil, totally Rahman. He plays with reggae and jungle rhythms, runs cool variations on Morricone’s scores for Italian westerns, and fiddles with Broadway-style orchestrations. It was an astonishing debut.
A Rahman Sampler
Soon Rahman received commissions for Hindi films as well as Tamil. Over the next decade, his music accompanied, and often transcended, some of the most popular and critically acclaimed Indian films. As South Asians took root around the world and their local movie culture avidly followed them, one could hear Rahman’s music even if it didn’t puncture the consciousness: as background music in restaurants and posh stores, in the very beat of certain neighborhoods, and of course in the movies that occasionally broke out of Desi ghettos. Lagaan, the insurgent epic centered on an Anglo-Indian cricket match, was nominated for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar. Again Rahman’s work went uncited — though not, by Western film cultists, unappreciated. As they discovered India’s pop cinema, they realized that along with the ferocious emoting and delirious dances, there was a master composer — the man Indians call the Mozart of Madras.
Rahman has said that his work became “a little repetitive and monotonous” with the heavy post-Roja workload. Composing 50 movie scores and more than 200 songs will test any man’s melodic ingenuity. But each film contains a sprig, often a full bouquet, of musical inspiration. And because Rahman is a meticulous and assured record producer, collaborating with the stars of India’s teeming “playback” industry (where famous singers record the songs that the movies stars will lip-synch), he was making not just wonderful music but terrific records. Hits.
Tahna Tahna Yahan Pe Jeena, from Rangeela, is a techno-pop explosion, with veteran playback diva Asha Bhosle giving the number a sassily youthful interpretation; her vocal swings its hips. Sun Ri Sakhi, from the movie Hum Se Hai Muqabla, is a lovely lullaby in waltz time, and Saagar Se Milne a ravishing chorale sun by children. In Bombay, Ratnam’s Hindi-language smash, the Rahman contributions range from Keyna Hi Kya, with intricate, warm singing by Chitra, to the macho Hamma Hamma, from Kucchi Kucchi Rakkama (which briefly channels Donna Summer) to Kuch Bhi Na Socho, an uptempo technopopper that midway through adds a children’s chorus and goes strangely Hawaiian!
To the uninitiated, this must seem like a list in Esperanto. So rush out to a large music store, or, if you’re lucky, one in a nearby Indian neighborhood, and get a Rahman compilation CD. You can also hear some of the songs on websites, including bollyvista.com. It’s hard, quickly characterizes a Rahman song, because it can change direction, tempo, and speed several times in its three- to seven-min. span. The composer has a voracious musical appetite; he knows Indian classical, folk and pop music intimately, as well as all other kinds of Western and Asian forms. (Last year he workd on the Chinese martial-arts drama Warriors of Heaven and Earth.)
For example, Telephone Dhun, from Hindustani, has a pumping middle section reminiscent of John Lennon’s I Am the Walrus. Jhoom Jhoom, from Chor Chore, begins as a perky pop duet and ends, almost, as a choral Christmas carol. The film Love Birds has a number, Come On Come On, that screams Top 40, with bagpipes, crazy fiddles and an all-girl chorus. Strawberry Aankhen, from the movie Sapney, is a perfect-for-Broadway tune, with smilingly melodic, near-operatic recitatives for boy and girl; the song shifts from 3/4 time to a shuffle beat and ends in a meter too complicated for me to parse.
You needn’t see the movies to enjoy the music. The terminally goofy plastic-surgery drama Vishwavidhaata boasts a seductive number, Kal Nahin Tha, with the vocalist Sujatha whispering, then warbling her heart out; the production has a tinge of Phil Spector’s early-60s work with the Paris Sisters. The Karisma Kapoor-starrer Zubeida boasts a dizzying musical melange: George Martinesque orchestrations for Dheeme Dheeme and George Harrisonesque raga guitar work on Hai Na, a sweet and sinuous samba that’s brilliantly vocalized by Alka Yagnik and Udit Narayan. The legendary Lata Mangeshkar (she’s recorded tens of thousands of songs in her 60-year career) illuminates two Zubeida numbers, So Gaye Hain and Pyaara Sa Gaaon, both with gorgeously elaborate orchestral scoring.
A Quirky Favorite
Rahman still works the epic side; Swades, Ashtosh Gowanker’s first directorial effort since Lagaan, opened around the world two weeks ago. His score for the West End musical adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, rumored to open in spring or summer 2005, will surely contain its share of symphonic work and ballads. But recent Rahman has gone heavier on the rap, techno-pop and house-party side of the musical equation.
Just to be perverse, I’ll pick as the best of his ravier numbers I Wanna Be Free from last year’s Tehzeeb. The song, with lyrics by Blaaze, is widely reviled even by Rahmaniacs. “What in the world went wrong with ‘I Wanna Be Free’?” asks Narbir Gobal on the Planet Bollywood site. “I understand Rahman’s urge to experiment, but really this sounds more like a drug induced trip rather than a ‘song.’ Skip it!” So of course I love it.
One reason is the sheer ballsiness of the enterprise. The movie is about a strong woman (the great Shabana Azmi) and her estranged daughters Tehzeeb (Urmila Matondkar) and the mentally distraught Nazu (Diya Mirka). Toward the end of the film Nazu rushes into her bedroom, clamps on headphones and listens to the technopoppy I Wanna Be Free. The picturization shows how moving convulsively, desperately to the funky beat, turning ever more agitated, until we wonder what she wants to be free from: free from her domestic vise, or free from life?
The song’s vocalists, Anupma and Mathangi, get Fs from the Bollywood swamis; I think they’re swell and scary. One spit out the chorus (“I wanna be free I wanna be free / Break the chain and let me be / Free like a bird and free like a plane / I wanna be free from all the pain”) in fine percussive style; the other wailing the verse (“Break the shackles” in Hindi) like a stoned goddess who’s seized control of an airport P.A. system. Then, as Rahman finally introduces two new chords and a backing female chorus, she soars into a majestic, anthemic “Freeeeee-dom.” She’s a bird, she’s a plane, she’s Superplaybacksinger. And on the screen, the criminally beautiful Mirza (Miss Asia Pacific of 2000), listens to the Freedom chorus and slowly lifts a gun to her head.
Bollywood or Bust
Bombay Dreams begins with Hindu, Muslim, and Zoroastrian prayers, but its heart is as secular as its definition of a Bollywood production number: “cuties shaking booties.” The 2002 London version was stocked with references to Bombay films and luminaries, from the 50s hits Aan, Devdas and Mother India to the modern holy trinity of Hrithik, Shahrukh, even Amitabh. Scripter Meera Syal had fun creating full-of-themselves movie actors, like the sexy star Rani, of whom it is said, “She cries 17 times in the first number, though it’s a comedy.” Rani declares her aspirations as a serious actress. She wants to be in an art film, but she also wants to be recognized: “Can’t I be a simple peasant girl — in a very tight blouse?” When the serious picture is completed, one observer says to its director, “I think you’ve made an important and beautiful film. Of course no one will notice until you’re dead.”
The tone of address toward Bollywood was one of affectionate scorn, as personified by the bitchy gossip reporter Kitty de Souza, who encourages one old man: “Please tell us how you feel — in song, if you must.” Kitty notes that the hero is “shooting 15 movies at the same time” and, when he launches into a noble platitude, snides: “I smell another actor ripe for politics.” Everyone is disdainful of the airs the hot new kid is putting on. “When you start getting the kidnap threats,” the show’s villain says to him, “then you can behave like a star.” The musical has all the generic prerequisites: star-crossed lovers and love-crossed stars, betrayals and murder, a wedding scene and an all-singing, all-dancing happy ending. As our hero notes, “Can’t end on a car crash or something.” And if it steals as greedily from Bollywood films as they do from Hollywood ones, it does so without shame. As one thieving director in the show states: “Copyright means the right to copy.”
The theatrical wit on display here might not be at the level of a Shaw or a Stoppard. But it was knowing; and Syal, a writer and performer on the Anglo-Indian sitcom Goodness Gracious Me, could assume that the London audience would be knowing too — they’d be familiar enough with the genre to get the jokes poked at it. Bollywood films get a fairly wide release in the U.K., often making the weekend box-office top ten. Because the South Asian community is proportionately larger in Britain than in the U.S., the Bollywood culture more deeply permeates the official culture. Indian films can gross millions in the States and not be seen by anyone outside the subcontinental diaspora.
The challenge for Broadway Bombay Dreams, as its producers saw it, was that a New York audience would be ignorant of Bollywood’s conventions and thus not understand what was satire and what was just silly. So Thomas Meehan, who had co-written the books for The Producers and Hairspray — two successful shows that parodied old movies and musicals — and charged him with translating into Broadwayese a culture that was not only foreign but obscure. Essentially, he had to write a primer on Bollywood: explain the genre, then rack some jokes about it. Most of Syal’s best lines vanished. The show became soft and lumpy. The New York Bombay Dreams was a desperate, failed reworking of the London version — as, 16 years before, the Broadway edition of Chess had been in comparison to the West End original.
From Bollywood To Britain To Broadway
In my catalog of Rahman film favorites, I didn’t mention some of his best-known songs, because they went into Bombay Dreams. They were plucked from their original movie context (usually), given English-language settings (mostly) by lyricist Don Black and sung by (generally) different artists,
Many of them are sensational; I did say that his score was up there with the immortals. Of the oldies imported to the West, two of the best are from the 1999 inside-showbiz film Taal: everyone’s favorite ballad Love’s Never Easy (Ishq Bina) and the dreamier Closer Tan Ever(Nahin Samne). The sexy, dancey Shakalaka Baby is from Nayak. The girl-group Ohh La La is an Anglicizing of Ek Bagiya from Sapney. Happy Endings, with all its movie-lore references, was originally Rangeela Re from Rangeela.
If one song triggered Rahmania among non-Indians in the West, it was Chaiyya Chaiyya, from another Ratnam terrorist tragedy, the 1998 Dil Se. Shahrukh Khan stands atop a speeding train and (using the thrilling voice of Sukhwinder Singh) performs this update of a Sufi chant, with lyrics by the esteemed poet Gulzar. Andrew Lloyd Webber happened to hear Chaiyya one Saturday when Britain’s Channel 4 broadcast Dil Se, and the song convinced him that the West was ready for Rahman. It remains Rahman’s most pulsing, irresistible song, which gets me juiced and happy any time I put it on RealPlayer. When Chaiyya opened the second act of Bombay Dreams (with Singh, on disc, still vocalizing), it had audiences stamping their feet and cheering. Not after the song — during it.
In the 80s, Chess was misidentified as a rock score (when pop-rock was just one element in a broad table of genres). This year Bombay Dreams was tabbed as Indian, and that frightened people away. The prejudice was that the music would be too spicy for general tastes; the majority, who don’t like musical curry, would scurry. That’s a pity, for the show, and for those who didn’t get to see or hear it. Rahman doesn’t even write what’s thought of as world music. He writes a world of music — so broad and deep, so instantly likable and lastingly satisfying, it is the whole world. I hope that, sometime soon, our part of the world catches up with Rahman. Until we do, an important part of our internal jukebox will be bereft.
