AR Rahman on Sting squirming as he watches José Feliciano ‘murder’ ‘Every Breath You Take’ on stage: ‘I’ve been there’

People were quick to observe Sting’s reaction as he was sitting in the audience during the performance. One person remarked, “Sting just goes through 4 phases of grief during that thing. Near the end you can see him accept the cringe and he learns to love again,” another person had written, ” Man. I’ve never seen a performer wince in pain as someone butchered his own song in front of him before now.”

AR Rahman has always strongly voiced out his concerns about people remaking and reimagining original pieces of music. Responding to his tweet, one of his fans shared a video clip of the music composer talking against the remix culture in an old interview with the Quint. Here, he is heard saying, “I think it is not compensated with other things. It was not a bad idea. But when it gets too repetitive and a million people do that, then it becomes like, you know, over done and becomes a cliché and it becomes annoying. So the thing is, I heard from a lot of composers, there is an original composition and people have worked hard on it. The director was given a, you know, an idea and the composer has done, the lyric writers done, actors have acted, so it’s holy for people.”

He then goes on to speak up against the remix of his iconic song “Ishwar Allah” penned by Gulzar. He said, “You can’t take that, push all the names and put the remixer’s name on it. And they don’t even credit the original composers. So that was the annoying thing. That’s what I’ve heard a couple of songs have been like, they don’t even credit and they put something, just add two more lines to it and it becomes theirs. So in a way that this generation will think, ‘Oh! that’s a cool song by this remixer.’ So that’s not a good thing. So credits have to be given and permission has to be taken. Like for instance, one of my songs ‘Ishwar Allah’ is one of my favourite songs, and Javed Akhtar sahib wrote it. They took that song and they really killed it.”

The music composer is being appreciated for his composition in Mani Ratnam’s Ponnyin Selvan 2.

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