AR RAHMAN NEXT CONCERT
The earliest usage of the nickname ‘Mozart of Madras’ I could find was in 2004 — a TIME magazine article titled the same. A rather short piece about AR Rahman’s Bombay Dreams that said ARR’s name stood in unison with “melody, quality, energy, instant hummability — a sound both personal and universal, devouring many older forms and transforming them into something gorgeously new.” The description of Rahman’s brand of music is perfect, except for the phrase ‘instant hummability’. In fact, there is a three-step penance to savouring the legend’s music; the phase of dissatisfactory shock (the what is this phase), the phase of the indulgent listener (I know I don’t like it but let me hit the play button one more time.) and then, epiphanic addiction (Why didn’t I like this before?). The penance has become so customary that we don’t instantly reject a song that has the AR Rahman tag. Take the 2.0 album for instance. The unanimous verdict was ‘Give it time, we will see it’. The Isai Puy...