Where "Raja Kayya vechu ..athu Wronga pochu" ...

Many music composers have given the world of music some really excellent compositions that at once melt the hearts of thousands of music lovers all over the world. India's contribution in this list is a very significant one because right from the time the film industry has laid its foot at the centre stage, cine-music has been in tremendous highlight reaching almost immediate popularity amongst all classes of the public. We have seen some really amazing composers in the past 75 years or so ... Naushad, Shankar- Jaikishan, S D Burman in the Bollywood and K V Mahadevan, MSV-Ramamurthy, Raja, Rahman in Kollywood. Each and every music director mentioned above has gifted us with some amazing contributions through their songs and BGMs but today's post is memory of one man who quite single-handedly towered the value of music in movies from mere appreciation of nuances to a royalty. No other music director has had thousands of people crowd outside his recording studio for more than 5 hours awaiting a glimpse. No other music director has had producers queue in front of his office begging him to score music for an otherwise ordinary movie in order to rise himself out of the burden of growing debt. It can be and has to be -Raja.

Generally the career of any artist / sportsman (an indvl) has a growth period, a peak and then a deterioration
period. Very few people make the first two last long and cast a non-failing impression during the same. Sachin Tendulkar is one such imminent example i can think of who has pretty much safe-guarded his image and reputation though we all know that he is not what he was. He is making his twilight a much more admirable. But a genius has some traits. One of them ( and probably the most important one) is that he/she doesn't confirm to a generic set. There is a typical anisotropy that one can relate them to. Einstein had such an anisotropy in the fact that until his death he could just not bring himself to accepting Quantum Mechanics. Many of the then famous scientists like Dirac and Schroedinger requested Einstein to just at least virtually work on this field because they knew that if he did, surely some miracle would result. The egos of geniuses never go hand in hand, but with Einstein, there were many who had foregone their ego to go and request him as far as possible to just give a cursory look into the quantum theories. But he just wouldn't. Not because he had any enmity or counter-ego clashes with these scientists. It was just that moving on to work on something that he couldnt bring himself to believe was just not possible. It is like those orthodox grandparents of our generation who would as well stay hungry the whole day if they couldnt find a pure-veg hotel when out for a tour. ( Warning - Anisotropy is a characteristic of geniuses, but the rule doesnt work the other way ! ). Raja in the same lines had his own reservations. He sets the rules in his game since he knows what he is doing. There is another thing that Raja possessed which is quite unique to him (at least in comparison to someone i shall talk of later) - he was never flattered by money.

Come Thalapathy and Raja scaled a height that no other Indian music director has ever scaled before. His intro-song for Rajnikanth (Rakkama kaiya thattu) was selected in the top ten of the world's most popular songs that year. Remember, that this was the time when Mani had not still weaved the Roja magic; a time when Rajni was still a great hero but not yet the super-star that Annamalai and Baasha made him. And lets also not forget that its not just the popularity of the reigning duo that would have made some really strong critics consider a song while rating it. It just had to be this song because of the extreme violin play right at the start of the song. To my knowledge, it still stands out as the finest piece of violin orchestration in Indian film music. how many layers and all with violins !!! the London Philharmonic immediately arranged our Raja to come and perform for them and give some Lec-dem kind of thoughts on how he assembled his music - which include nuances of music they were the finest at like chords, harmonics, seconds etc etc - that is quite an acheivement. But what Raja missed was the timing.

Early nineties is the time when radios and televisions started becoming a household possession of all classes. The media reach through electronic medium rose in the last decade of the 19th century. And raja was 30 yrs old into fim music by then. Electronic media (esp TV) was younger than Raja and Rahman who was parallel to this period struck the right chord. Moreover, Rahman suits Mani the way Raja suits Bharathiraja. The brought up, the ideologies, the period ( Raja is much elder than Mani ) all decides on how good you are able to relate with a theme. This is why no-body has extracted Rahman as good as Mani and Shankar. Mani's movies are the typical middle class pro-sophistication pro-elegance type and this reflects the way he was brought up. Its very similar with Rahman and it clicked the best in Roja. Roja music is not rich as such, but the sync with the story is what makes it such a memorable album. Raja was out of sync in this respect. People started having the taste of digital media and Mani represented want the common man liked. Shankar showcased what a overall audience would like. The generation gap is what Raja missed. He had the opportunity to update himself since Rahman was born only 7 years after Punnagai Mannan which is the first tamil movie to use a sequencer (or whatever, basically the digital music era that can avoid an orchestra). But he under-estimated this revolution. And Rahman who knew that it would spin wonders struck gold !

Otherwise who in his right mind would have even thought of displacing Raja. It had to be Balachander who produced Roja requesting Mani to shift gears and when Mani and Balachander present a change .... a change as good as Roja ... theres not much on can do ... not even the mighty Raja : reality revealed itself untidily over Raja's face - The producer is the king-maker in a movie.

To tell the truth Raja never had a really good hand over the technical gimmicks since from Punnagai Mannan onwards .. the usage of the sequencer and synthesizers made Raja's music too simple and out of content. The Punnagai Mannan theme starts off brilliantly, but has an equal abyss in the middle portions until the violins rescue it back. Raja couldnt master the nuance of mixing the sounds of a synthesized tune and an orchestrated tune which is where Rahman excelled. Raja worked on a format that he invented when he arrived, a format that was 30 odd years old and a format that needed modifications. Raja was known for brilliantly embedding various styles of music in one song. the perfect example is " Enda poovilum vaasam undu - Murattukalai ". (the initial guitar piece though is lifted from a brazilian guitarist). The point of comparison lays flat if one carefully listens to that song. The start is western and the pallavi is also oddly rendered by the female vocalist but in the charanams the song is very folkish (typical raja). So the shifting of styles clearly has to happen in the interludes and this is exactly what Raja does in a very very convincing and smooth fashion. But note curiously that Raja shifts styles maintaining the inherent chastity of each style intact. This is what he introduced. But Rahman on the other hand followed what i would accredit as the MSV-style. He maintained a predominant style always in which he subtly mixed other styles as and when required. The best example that i can think of here is " Aaja meere bahoon mein - Yuvraj " ... we can clearly see that there is no unique style at any point of time during the song. (You may ask that " Tu muskura " from the same movie has two distinct styles .... but thats a story compulsion that anil kapoor sings a classical hindusthani which blends as a fusion with the western style). Rahman's overall style is nowhere. Its a mix of western music, some digital gimmicks and some tiny inventions all tidily wrapping around a carnatic base. So every listener gets what he wants though its not available in discrete.

The unfortunate point here for Raja was that, the digitalization of electronics necessary for recording was more suited to the western classical music than ours. It was more of a sound engineering which suits well with their kind ofwhere the gamakams and the brighas are absent. Raja in the late eighties , i must confess, did qutie a poor job of handling the then recent advancement that technology had provided. "Pottu vaitha Kaadhal thittam " was good ... but im not convinced that it is great example of the digital culture .... " Nee paartha parvai - Hey Ram" was. the definition of richness of a song or the completeness in a composition had changed .... " Senthoora Poove " - is a perfect song that i can think of in the 70s but in the 90s it had to be " Veerapandi kottaiyile ". How smooth one instrument blends into another was defined as "A" by Raja but was re-defined as "B" by Rahman.

But still if there is one thing that separates Raja from Rahman, it is his sincerity to the art. Never can i imagine Raja working in a movie just because he gets a shit load of money in it. But i know very well that Rahman may produce a shit album but still work in a movie as long as the banner is big. And it is this very reason that even during his decline Raja produced an amazing album in Veera. It was a big movie since Rajni was the hero. He had a very good chance to convince the audience that he was still there ... but alas .... the Rahman wave had swept across the state by then and all Raja's fans could do was appreciate the fact that their generation was over. The younger generation got what they liked exactly as they got what they liked and hence its farewell to Raja. And Raja has always been a people's man in the sense that its the continuous appraisal that helps him going. It was as though the moment the attention of the crowd diverted ... all his musical skills plummetted. Yes Pithamagan was a good album ... but wasnt the song that was a very famous hit " Ilankatru veesuthe " reminding us of " Thendral vandhu theendumbodhu - Avataram " ??

Wasnt Hey Ram sounding like the cries of Bheeshma ridden on a bed of arrows courtesy Arjuna, facing someone he knew was good but only that he couldnt go against his loyalties to be on the same side and remain the greatest warrior ever ?? Ironically similar is the situation of Rahman that he does things that is atypical of Raja so as to establish his ground because he knows that in the areas that Raja has touched ... it would take a lifetime of an extreme genius to better. Arjuna knew that it would be impossible to destabilize Bheeshma from his chariot and the only way had to be to attack in a manner that Bheeshma would not participate in. Only there in the Mahabharat ... both loved each other and fought against each other unwillingly owing to differences in loyalties. Here ... God only knows !! Bheeshma on his death bed gave the "Vishnu Shasranama" which is what he is connected most with. Raja in his twilight has given us a song composed of just three swaras (Sa, Ri and Ga) which re-iterate my stands:

" pAda piRanthathu pAttuththAn - enathu kUda piRanthathu pAttuththAn!

(Music is born to be sung, it is born along with me)

vAzha piRanthathu pAttuththAn - enathu vAzhkkai muzhuvathum pAttuththAn!

(Music is born to live, my life in totality is music)