Here I'd like to point out (HUGE speculation-alert) what *I think* irks Raaja the most about Rahman's ascendancy in the 90s. The remarkable lack of 'continuity' in the legacy of Tamil film music that Rahman's intervention brought about.

Firstly, Raaja himself brought in a lot of modern sound/orchestration to TFM and, let's not kid ourselves, greatly altered the scheme of things for the then old warhorse MSV. It's hard to imagine a greater game-changer than Raaja in this regard. But Raaja's artistic expedition was nevertheless immensely organic to the evolution of Tamil film music, which embraced all the paradigms of the latter and transcended it proper. His compositions from the late 70s era mark this wonderfully as Raaja updates MSV as he ought to, and prepares Tamil film music and its audience for the sort of stuff he was about to unleash in the 80s. In a sense, the 'artistic inheritance' dynamic that we see in Sibi Malayil's Bharatham is at work here. With the advent of a pop-auteur genius like Raaja, the retirement of MSV was more or less inevitable. But what's important, and perhaps the only solace for the aging artist, is Raaja's compositions continued to carry a sense of homage to MSV's era, a genuine gesture that continued to hearken back to the erstwhile era and at the same time sign it (so to say) as one's own.

This sense of a 'continuity' was what was missing for the most part in the music that Rahman unleashed in the 90s. Don't mistake me, I'm not saying that his compositions simply didn't sound like TFM ones. They sure did, but for whatever reasons, he didn't so much as touch Raaja with a bargepole. He didn't update Raaja as the latter might have hoped and feared (at once) someone would.

However all this is not to judge Rahman's intervention in terms of whether or not it carried forward the TFM legacy. In fact, refusing to carry a legacy is one of the chief characteristics of a revolutionary intervention. So the Rahman question ought to be only about how phenomenal his 'revolutionary' intervention as such was/is to TFM. Which is of course an entirely different debate.

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