Subramaniapuram and the Tamil Film Song Aesthetic

Hi. Yes, delay in publishing next part of Love Theme in Ritigowla. Yes, yes, I know. But, believe it or not, I have some "administrative issues" with that. Meanwhile, chew on this. And wait. One more announcement - a series of essays on my favourite ragas will come up once I'm done with the Love Theme. So, wait. And while waiting, read this.
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I engaged in two one-and-a-half hour drives in the first half of today. Ten minutes into the first drive, I realised that I hadn't taken any music for the drive. I wasn't in the mood for excited RJs and Telugu smash hits on FM, and silence through Tarnaka traffic was not an option. And then, I had a moment of sudden, extreme brilliance. I remembered that I had my laptop bag with me, and there would be some CD in it.

The only CD was Subramaniapuram.

There's a fascinating story of how I discovered this album. The idea of Love Theme in Ritigowla had been kicking around in my head for a while, and one night, I had this vague idea of an actual theme in Ritigowla. Nothing concrete. Just a thought. I woke up the next morning, humming some Theme in Ritigowla that I had presumably heard in my dream. I was damn excited about the whole thing, but certain other works kept me from getting down to crystallise this idea. In my TV watching break, I flipped by Vijay TV when I heard "Kangal Irundal" from Subramaniapuram, in Ritigowla! It was very very close to the theme I had in mind!

I downloaded the song off somewhere, and fell in love immediately.

I was in Madras on the next day, and I looked in three shops for the CD. All shops (in Pondy Bazaar area) told me that they were out of stock. Now, I was stunned. Finally, after romantic coffee with A.X. at Spencer's, I managed to find the CD at Landmark. (I just realised that people reading this paragraph in isolation will think that Madras must be a supremely British place - 'Pondy' Bazaar, a Spencer's and a Landmark.) I spent most of the next three weeks just listening to that one song. Only this morning, driving in Hyderabad, did I manage to check out the whole album in its entirety.

Subramaniapuram is a great album. No question about it. "Kangal Irundal" is very beautiful, and features this magical interlude after the first verse. If anything, the rest of the album is even better. The second song, "Madera Kulunga Kulunga" is a Tamil folk odyssey of the highest order. It works in movements, like a symphony, from the catchy choruses, to the haunting folksy, old lady voices, to the electric koothu drumming, and back to the choruses. Then comes Shankar Mahadevan's "Kaadal Siluvayil", and this is where this weird feeling of deja vu begins to set it. You've heard stuff like this all before, and yet, this album has something about it. The same for the first two songs, but its only with the third that this feeling strengthens. By the time you're in the Subramaniapuram Theme, you're all too familiar with the music, but that other feeling sets in even stronger - the feeling that you're listening to something special. The last song, "Theneeril Snehitam" featuring some rap (thankfully not Blaaze again!) confirms it: Subramaniapuram is one of the best Tamil albums of this decade, in the league of Virumaandi and Ayutha Ezhuthu.

But Subramaniapuram also confirms one other thing - that without the work of those music directors before him, such music wouldn't have been conceivable. Ilayaraaja set an aesthetic for Tamil film music in his heydey - he is the forefather of fusion, he is the granddaddy of using Tamil folk and Western orchestration in the same song, he is the one who defined how many people after him would approach composing music for Tamil cinema. After him, came another genius - some people say, an even bigger genius (I'd just point them to Thiruvasagam and ask them if they can still hold that opinion) - who had it in him to refine that aesthetic, and then set out to create his own. If Ilayaraaja brought a large Yamaha keyboard from the West, Rahman brought a computer. Both borrowed extensively from Western Classical, Carnatic and Folk music. Ilayaraaja used jazz, even a cappella, Rahman went a step further and used hip-hop and rap (and thus game Blaaze, who was originally a Gopalakrishna languishing in Zimbabwe, a career).

What they have done though, is set an aesthetic for Tamil music - a crude term would be a formula. This is what creates the familiarity when we listen to Harris Jeyraj or Yuvan Shankar Raja. This is the deja vu in Subramaniapuram. And it is, quite possibly, the best deja vu feeling in the world.

This, singularly, has saved Tamil music from going the way of its North Indian counterpart - newer Hindi music is either infernal or Korean or French.
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Update: Circumstances have reminded me of "Om Namaha" from Geetanjali, one of my favourite Ilayaraaja albums. Listen to the beat closely - the lub-dubbing of the heart - in the background. Lub-dub, lub-dub. Lub-dub, lud-dub. The first lub-dub and the second one aren't symmetrical. The lub-dubs are of equal length, but gap is longer on the second. That beat is just pure genius. Its nothing new - it is 3 (lub-dub plus one gap)+4 (lub-dub plus two gaps)=7. But simplifying the seven to a heartbeat, and weaving a whole song around that heartbeat is magical. It takes an Ilayaraaja to do that!