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Slumdog Millionaire - Music From The Motion Picture

Various Artists

Film Soundtracks - Released December 21, 2008 | Interscope

It's ironic that the most recognized album of A.R. Rahman is not his best work. For many Rahman fans, Slumdog Millionaire is not exactly the sound that they attribute to him. His Bollywood successes are designed as playback songs rather than as background scores. Thus, with the additional element of vocal melodies, his past accomplishments weigh heavily in public perception of his incredible music. While it very well deserved the enthusiastic applause at the Academy Award and Golden Globe ceremonies, Slumdog Millionaire will ignite lesser fervor in someone who has followed Rahman's music closely over the past two decades. It still has the all-pervading signature sound of Rahman with its brilliant percussion, ominous electronica, and somber crooning, yet it displays a more hurried pace in contrast to his more subtle offerings, in which music serves as a colorful canvas behind beautiful vocal portraits. What's more interesting with this album is the flash of experimentation that wouldn't have been possible in a Bollywood album -- minimalist electronica with "Riots," acid jazz with "Millionaire," and big beat with "Liquid Dance." Rahman packs this album with his usual well-credited crew, including Blaaze for the hip-hop-styled "Gangsta Blues," Sukhwinder Singh for album highlight "Jai Ho," and Suzanne for the lighthearted "Latika's Theme" and "Dreams on Fire." The most talked-about addition in the list of singers here is M.I.A. She delivers exciting vocals on the opening theme "O... Saya." The album also includes an original song from M.I.A.'s Kala album, the hit "Paper Planes" (also here in a special remix), as well as the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy composition "Aaj Ki Raat" from the film Don. The success of Slumdog Millionaire's music can be traced back to the success of the film, and while the world was late in noticing Rahman until Slumdog Millionaire remedied that situation, listeners should explore his other offerings -- both past and, one assumes, future -- that could be considered more highly deserving of accolades. © Bhasker Gupta /TiVo

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Highlights From Slumdog Millionaire (Music Inspired by the Film)

Slumdogs

Film Soundtracks - Released December 4, 2009 | Foyer

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The Best of A.R. Rahman - Music and Magic from the Composer of Slumdog Millionaire

A.R. Rahman

Pop/Rock - Released February 19, 2009 | Sony Music Entertainment India Pvt. Ltd.

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A.R. Rahman is best known outside of India for his compositions on the soundtrack of Slumdog Millionaire, but he's written for many film scores. The Best of A.R. Rahman has 14 tracks drawn from ten of them, though nothing from Slumdog Millionaire, which itself would seem to disqualify this as the best possible best-of. The minimal packaging doesn't tell us much about the composer or the recordings, though judging from the copyrights, the material spans 1997 to 2006. What it lacks in annotation, however, it does make up for in quantity, with 73 minutes of music. The music's as much of a mélange of different elements as devotees of Indian soundtracks have come to expect, to varying degrees fusing traditional-inclined Indian instrumentation and melodies with up-to-the-minute technobeats and energetic, at times sexy vocals. Even measured against the usual eclecticism of such productions, Rahman is diverse, able to devise fairly frivolous dance numbers, straight-ahead romantic Indian pop, airy ballads, and pastoral pieces with a less urban flavor. Not much is easily pigeonholed, however; just when you think Shreya Ghoshal and Uday Mazumdar's "Barso Re" is going to be a pretty traditional tune without a whiff of modernity, the chanting choruses and hard electronic beats take it in a different direction. Not much of this is as eccentric to non-Indian ears as the kind of Bollywood that draws a cult following for its exotic feel, and some pieces, like Lata Mangeshkar's "So Gaye Hain," have a sedate quality with more of the classical-influenced cinematic orchestration many associate with soundtracks the world over. But neither is it too mainstream, though Preeya Kalidas and Raza Jaffrey's "Shakalaka Baby," much of which is sung in English, comes close to being dancefloor filler that could be played almost anywhere in the world without sounding out of the ordinary.© Richie Unterberger /TiVo