Originally Posted by
KV
Thumburu, this is precisely the reason why I think this soundtrack is such a colossal one - the mind-boggling variety.
The first time I listened to the whole album, my mind automatically 'selected' saindhu, kaatrai konjam, ennOdu va, vaanam mella and pudikkala maam, for these immediately had a 'frequency match' with the theevira IR rasigan in me.
The other 3 songs - mudhal murai, pengal endraal, satru munbu - left me scratching my head as I couldn't 'connect' to these. "Now, what is IR trying to do here? Where is 'my Raaja' or 'the-Raaja-I-know' in these songs?" I asked myself. The singing felt 'alien' within the 'Raaja territory', thanks to the heavy anglicized style (which one can safely generalize as a trademark of sorts of any contemporary melody). The tuning and structuring of these songs too felt quite unfamiliar. My immediate response was the similar to yours – “Can’t arr/gvp/harris/thaman/joshua/ysr do something like this? Why is Raaja even ‘required’ for these songs?”.
Then, after some more listening and ‘building acquaintance’ with them, the ideas appear to start taking shape. Yes, this is very much ‘contemporary’ in musical style, but it doesn’t end there. Raaja elevates these songs through his authority over orchestration, incorporating a score, which in my books, nobody other than him can possibly conceive. It’s like Raaja saying to the younger MDs “yeah, this is what you guys do, right? Now let me show you my way of doing the same.” For Raaja, this might simply be another step in his constant evolution as a composer (though personally I see it as a ‘leap’!). Although there is absolutely no ‘necessity’ for him to ‘answer’ anyone criticizing him as ‘out-dated/can’t keep up with trends’, the very urge and ability to re-invent and re-construct himself as a composer, automatically becomes a ‘response’ of sorts to the skeptics. Yes, Raaja old-timers like some of us here will take time to warm-up to this and accept the fact that Raaja is (either deliberately or unintentionally) wearing the hat of a contemporary composer (which, by the way, is imperative here because of the film, its maker and the target audience – the youth crowd). But, importantly, in doing this, Raaja has not killed the ‘classic’ composer in him, which is why we still have songs like kaatrai konjam and vaanam mella or saidhu saidhu. The end result is this mammoth of an album, one half of which is vintage Raaja and the other, a very atypical Raaja (like I'd said earlier - covering all bases).
