Mumbai: AR Rahman has responded to the criticism surrounding the music of Nitesh Tiwari’s upcoming film Ramayana: Rise of a Legend.
Addressing the mixed response to the recently released song Mangal Rang, the composer said he does not feel obliged to respond to every opinion about his work.
Citing Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Rahman said, “If you want to satisfy everyone, go sell ice cream.”
In an interview with Screen, Rahman also discussed his creative process, stressing that music needs time to evolve and should not be judged too quickly.
He explained that compositions often undergo several rounds of consideration before reaching their final form, adding that he is usually his own first critic.
“I am my first critic. It is not that I just love everything I do. We don’t decide something in a day. We live with it for months sometimes. There’s a thought process,” he said.
Comparing music to food, Rahman said some compositions are like pickles, whose flavours deepen over time.
He added that listeners should also give themselves time to understand the thought behind a musical arrangement.
“Sometimes you need to take anthropology into consideration. Sometimes, you let something be, like pickle: for certain tunes, the older it is, the better it becomes,” he said.
The composer further pointed out that listeners may overlook the larger creative vision when they focus too narrowly on individual elements of a composition.
He believes patience can help them understand the reasoning behind certain musical choices.
“But people sometimes see one side. They don’t see the whole picture, right? So sometimes you just have to be patient. And they discover it and say, ‘Oh, that’s why you did this’ or ‘that’,” he said.
Rahman’s comments come amid mixed reactions to Mangal Rang, featuring Arijit Singh and Shreya Ghoshal, with lyrics by Kumar Vishwas.
Depicting the wedding of Lord Rama and Goddess Sita, the song sparked debate over its musical arrangement, particularly its perceived qawwali influences and electronic treatment of the Ravana tandava sequence.
While some listeners questioned whether the sound suited the Hindu epic, others felt the lyrics lacked the emotional depth and poetic quality they expected from a Rahman composition.