Cool Jay
His teacher thought he was dumb. Idolmakers thought he was ugly. But
Jay Chou has become Asia's hottest pop star
By Kate Drake Taipei
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501030303/story.html


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Jay Chou's songwriting skills have catapulted him into the top rank
of Asia's pop stars

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Before the satin bedsheets and Ducati motorcycles, before the
screaming groupies fainting at his shows and the teenage girls
making pilgrimages to stroke his piano bench, there was this narrow
stretch of blond floorboard between the leather sofa and the teal
walls of Alfa Music's studio in a gray, concrete high-rise in
eastern Taipei. This was Jay Chou Chieh-lun's world back then, a
crawl space where he would curl up and crash between sessions, where
he would dream and then redream his melodies and lyrics, where the
songs would come to him as snatches of somnambulant soundtrack, and
then he would rouse himself, stumble over to the keyboards and
transpose those nocturnal audioscapes onto music sheets and demo
tapes. For nearly two years Chou worked as a $600-a-song contract
composer and rarely left that seventh-floor soundproof chamber where
he cranked out melodies for less-talented, better-looking sing-ers.
He would write out the verses, the chorus, scratch the lyrics down
on the back of a takeaway menu and then, exhausted by the work, by
the unburdening of his musical subconscious, he would go back to
sleep among the dust bunnies to conjure up another hit. Subsisting
on ramen and fried chicken, he dreamed not of being a pop star but
of making music.

The Beatles had the Cavern Club, Elvis had Sun Studios, the Sex
Pistols had the 100 Club; for Chou, this studio was his musical
proving ground, where he tried out his ideas, tested theories of
what made a hit, worked out how to structure a song and make it
memorable and soulful and where—rare for a budding Mando- or Canto-
pop star—he came to understand that it was the music that mattered,
more than the looks and the moves and the image. He saw them come
and go, pretty boys who could barely carry a tune, divas who had the
attitude but not the talent, boy bands whose members were chosen for
their dance steps instead of their voice chops. He saw that what
made a performer memorable—what could make him, Jay Chou, special—
were the songs themselves.

And that, in the music biz as it's practiced from Taipei to Hong
Kong to Singapore, was a novel idea. In the cynical, insta-pop
industry of prepackaged icons that dominates greater China, it is a
wonder that Jay Chou the anti-idol, now 24, exists at all. Male
Canto- and Mando-pop stars are supposed to be born with connections,
grow up with money and emerge in adolescence as lithe, androgynous
pinups, prefabricated and machine-tooled for one-hit wonderdom and,
if they're lucky, lucrative B-movie careers and shampoo commercials.
How did a kid with an overbite, aquiline nose and receding chin
displace the Nicholases and Andys and Jackys to become Asia's
hottest pop star? The explanation starts somewhere back in that
stuffy studio, with the discipline and the songs and the
revolutionary idea that the music actually matters. "Even when my
female fans approach me, they don't tell me that I'm handsome," Chou
explains. "They tell me they like my music. It's my music that has
charmed them."

Since the release of his debut album, Jay, in November 2000—10
brooding, soulful, surprisingly sensual ballads and quiet pop tunes
delivered with a poise that would make Craig David stand up and take
notice—Jay Chou's music has ruled, and may be transforming, the
Asian pop universe. Although he sings and raps only in Mandarin,
Chou's CDs routinely go double or triple platinum, not only in his
native Taiwan but also in mainland China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and
Singapore. Recently he was voted Favorite Artist Taiwan at MTV's
Asian Music Awards, adding to a haul of more than 30 entertainment-
industry honors he has won in the past two years. The Hong Kong
media has anointed him a "small, heavenly King" (though Chou insists
he hates the title). He recently played the MGM Grand Garden Arena
in Las Vegas to an audience of more than 10,000. Major companies
have come calling for his endorsement, from Pepsi in China to pccw
in Hong Kong. Panasonic has even stamped his profile on one of its
cellular phone models—a high compliment in mobile-mad Asia even
greater than being known as diminutive celestial royalty.

As a boy, Chou was called retarded. Stupid. Yu tsun. Ellen Hsu, his
high school English teacher, figured Chou had a learning
disability: "He had very few facial expressions; I thought he was
dumb." The kid couldn't focus on math, science, didn't bother with
his English homework. But his mother, Yeh Hui-mei, noticed that the
quiet, shy boy seemed to practically vibrate when he heard the
Western pop music she used to play. "He was sensitive to music
before he could walk," she recalls. Yeh enrolled him in piano school
when he was four. And the kid could play. He practiced like a fiend,
focusing on the keys the way other children his age focused on a
scoop of ice cream. By the time he was a teen, he had developed a
knack for improvisation way beyond his years. "One time he sat down
and started playing the Taiwanese national anthem," says his high
school piano teacher Charles Chen. "It's usually very solemn but
Chou was riffing and turned it into an interesting piece of music,
one that sounded like a pop song."

Outside the practice room, Chou was stubbornly average, caught up in
the same kung fu movies and video games as the rest of the suburban
teens who played baseball around Linkou's ferroconcrete housing
blocks. While other kids were cramming for the joint-college-
entrance exam, Chou was skipping school and putting in more time on
the ivories. The kid looked like he was going nowhere. Music? If you
are middle-class and Taiwanese, math, science, engineering, computer
programming—that's how you make a living. But music? That was for
rich kids with famous parents, who grow up with silver chopsticks in
their mouths. Not kids from Linkou. Not Chou. He flunked his exam
and was about to be disgorged into the real world, a gawky kid
stumbling toward a future pumping gas or maybe, if he was lucky,
helping you pick out a new Yamaha upright and then sitting down at
the bench and completing the sale by playing a few bars for you.

But the music, remember, is all that matters in Chou's life. It
saves him. It defines him. It's his salvation, his luck. It's the
only thing he has. It interceded even when Chou himself had wandered
off course, when Chou didn't yet know the true value of his harmonic
birthright. Some girl, a junior—Chou barely knew her—filled out an
application for Chao Ji Xin Ren Wang (Super New Talent King),
Taiwan's version of American Idol. The show's staff got in touch
with a surprised Chou and asked if he would perform. No way. Not
solo.

He ended up playing piano, accompanying an aspiring singer. And they
stunk. The show's host, legendary Taipei funnyman and all-around
entertainment impresario Jacky Wu, was always on the prowl for new
talent, but he took one look at the nervous kid at the piano and the
croaking vocalist and thought, forget it, back to the burbs for this
duo. "I really wasn't impressed," says Wu. "The friend's singing was
lousy." Then he saw the music. "I took a look at the musical score
over the judge's shoulder and I was amazed. It was complex and very
well done." After the taping, Wu, who at that time owned Alfa Music,
headed backstage to meet Chou, who was wearing a baseball cap pulled
down over his eyes. "My first impression of Jay was that he was so
shy, so quiet," Wu recalls. "I thought he was retarded."

But Wu was swayed by the music. He had seen dozens of sneering
pretty boys with slicked-back hair who could barely read a high C,
and here was this shy, awkward pianist who seemed like he could
scrawl a symphony in his sleep. Wu would do more than write him his
first checks as a songwriter—he would also inadvertently give the
kid a place to crash between hits, would allow this suburbanite to
turn an unused space behind a sofa into a miniature pop-music
factory as he wrote tunes for late-'90s acts such as PowerStation
and Taiwan-ese diva Valen Hsu. "Jacky is like my elder brother,"
says Chou. "He taught me how to be an artist, to be professional and
to be dedicated to my career." But Chou was doing more than
transcribing catchy little ditties at six bills a pop (hit)—he was
inadvertently helping to define a sound, an emerging Taiwanese pop
presence and style that would, within three years, transform the
island into the epicenter of Chinese pop.

But the master still doubted his apprentice could be more than a
songwriter. "I didn't think Chou could make it as an entertainer,"
Wu admits, "because he's not so handsome." It wasn't until Wu handed
over the reins of Alfa Music to his friend and fellow singer J.R.
Yang nearly a year-and-a-half later that Chou would go from being
idol-maker to idol.

"I asked him if he'd written anything for himself," Yang explains.
Chou played him Ke Ai Nu Ren (Lovely Woman), a song he had already
recorded on borrowed time—hanging around the studio 24-7 did have
its advantages. "After four minutes the song finished, and I
asked, 'What are we waiting for?'" The kid was living in the studio
anyway. Recording the first album in three months was practically a
vacation.

Chou kicks back on that leather sofa today, wearing an off-white
wool cap pulled low over his brooding, brown eyes, and a black
velour tracksuit. He went from being studio geek to pop star
overnight, almost too quickly, and he carries the emotional and
psychological vestments of that fame and success uneasily. He's all
straight answers, monosyllabic responses, yes ma'ams and no ma'ams.
Grunts. Nods. Evasive eye rolls. Where is the smoldering sexuality
and boy-misses-girl pathos, the mannish lad who gives his soul
ballads depth and feeling?

Then he begins talking about the music, and you remember, yes, the
music. Take that away and you're left with this slab of a boy who
looks like he wants to climb back over that sofa and hunker down in
his old, creative lair. My music, he explains, my music should be
like magic. It should have variety. It should be ephemeral,
changing, evolving. He goes off on musical theory and Chopin and how
the cello is different from the violin and Chinese five-tone versus
Western 12-tone melodies. "It's my magic," he says again, shaking
his head, looking at you all earnest and sincere as if he needs you
to understand.

And then he opens up, revealing his yearning to find a girlfriend,
his own shyness that has him growing his hair long over his eyes so
he isn't distracted by his fans' staring.

Finally, he leans in close: "Let me tell you about diao."

Diao is a Taiwanese slang usually translated as "cool"
or "outrageous." It literally means "penis."

"It's my personal philosophy," he explains, "but it has nothing to
do with religion. It means that whatever you do, you don't try to
follow others. Go your own way, you know?"

He sits back, shakes his hair out of his eyes and nods. This is
serious. This is deep. This is the metaphysical mechanism that he
feels explains his pop stardom, as opposed to his musical
talent. "It's like, the ability to shock. The way I think of
shocking people is to do things that people don't expect in my
music, in my performances. Like during my first Taipei show last
year, I was performing Long Quan (Dragon Fist) [Chou's favorite tune
from his Eight Dimensions CD] and I took off on a harness and flew
out over the audience. That was diao."

Diao is an internal process, a mystical path that makes extreme
demands and forces stringent measures. It requires, mysteriously,
that Chou forgo wearing underwear, a lifestyle choice that is
endlessly vexing to his mother. "He used to wear underwear as a
child," she sighs. "Maybe it is something he started since working
with Jacky Wu." Chou himself will not elaborate. The diao that can
be spoken of, apparently, is not the eternal diao.

The diao, of course, has made him wealthy, a millionaire, but he
insists all that is a distraction. His mother manages his huge
income. His managers run his business and take care of his lucrative
endorsements. Though Alfa Music has given him a tony, Taipei
bachelor pad, Chou prefers living at home with mom in his childhood
bedroom with its single mattress, gray sheets and royal blue walls.
Ignore, for a moment, the complimentary Pepsi fridge with Chou's
likeness molded on the door and the dozens of music trophies and
awards, and it's a typical boy's room. And his home, despite his
parents' divorce when he was 14, was, he insists, a happy place. But
then where, if he had a contented childhood and then a quick
apprenticeship as contract songwriter, did the sadness and pathos
that could inform a precocious, soulful R. and B. singer come from?
How could a happy kid write lyrics about a drunken father who beats
his wife and child as he does on Ba Wo Hui Lai Le (Dad, I Have Come
Back), a jilted lover on the brink of suicide as on Shi Jie Mo Ri
(End of the World)? "I hear stories and I use them," he shrugs. "I
make them up. I go to see a movie or look at the elements of a music
video."

Chou is a sponge when it comes to music, absorbing styles and trends
and then seamlessly incorporating them into his Oriental-flavored R.
and B. "He mixes Western instruments with Chinese instruments, like
the di (Chinese flute) and the three-string sanxian," explains
Chou's friend and fellow musician Rex Jan. "He's also adopted
Chinese five-tone melodies as opposed to Western ones."

It's not as if Chou introduced R. and B. to the region—David Tao and
Wang Lee Hom have both been around for a while—but it wasn't until
Chou's debut that waves of Mando-rappers and crooning R. and B.
singers took over MTV Taiwan. "Chou is definitely setting musical
trends," says Hong Kong-based Ming Pao Weekly music critic Fung Lai-
chi.

His success as a singer-songwriter has already inspired dozens of
imitators eager to achieve a similar mixture of street cred and
sales sizzle. "The trend is toward more singer-songwriters," says
Mark Lankester, managing director of Warner Music Hong Kong. It
seems every pretty boy with a guitar is taking up composing; even
Canto-pop bad boy Nicholas Tse is now scribbling his own tunes. And
then there's Anson Hu, Hong Kong's junior soul man who recently won
Best New Artist at the Commercial Radio awards ceremony. "He's
copying Jay," says Fung. "He's even being called the new 'Chinese
Jay.'"

What makes Chou's music successful, and distinctive from all the
boys who would be Jay, is that when he sings that he is hurting or
yearning or that he needs you so bad, you believe him. His delivery
is Boyz II Men-smooth, and he hits those notes with a conviction
born of having proved himself as a songwriter. Remember, he spent
nearly two years in that studio watching and hearing what worked and
what didn't, and the results of that dues paying are a confidence
and a swagger that comes across on disc. On CDs like Jay, Fantasy
Life and Eight Dimensions, you're listening to a man who believes in
the musical choices he is making, who knows he is right. He is not
singing what some manager in an office somewhere has told him will
be a hit; he is singing his heart out, right now, for you.

Chou wants the ball. He's a hoops fiend, and he swears that the only
two places he's comfortable are in the studio and on the basketball
court. He takes a break from the 64-track and heads out to Taipei's
Ta An Park, where he and a few friends have a regular game. It's
concrete-court, no-holds-barred pickup—tall guys banging under the
rim, small guys at the top or on the wing. Everyone launching
jumpers. The only pass anyone wants to make is the one to inbound
the ball. But even here Chou seems different. John Stockton-skinny
with mad dribbles, he's a point guard among other players, who, no
matter where they are on the court, seem perpetually out of
position. The game, even at this level, flows through him. He hits
open threes, makes behind-the-back dribbles to the rack for easy
layups. Chou knows exactly what he wants to do with the ball.

So there's this, too. You see it when he plays. He's a control
freak. That's why he doesn't like interviews or awards ceremonies,
why he's shy and awkward around his fans, because he doesn't know
how to control those settings. But on the court, in the studio, he's
the show runner.

No other ethnic-Chinese idol enjoys the level of artistic and
creative control over his or her albums and videos that Chou does.
According to those who work with him, Chou knows exactly what he
wants when it comes to his sound, and he is relentless about
achieving it. In order to write one of his hits, Shuan Ji Gun
(Nunchaku), he actually taught himself to use the martial art weapon
and then appeared with it in the video. Kuang Sheng, who has
directed the majority of Chou's videos, says he follows the star's
instructions: "Chou has more control than other artists over his own
videos. And over time, he is only becoming more controlling."

A month later and Chou is lounging in a swanky Chinese restaurant
after his packed-house performance at the MGM Grand. Still wearing
his sweaty tank top and carefully scuffed jeans, he seems
contemplative, as if he is finally impressed by the enormity of his
own achievements. There are a few more worlds for this show-biz
Alexander to conquer: TV, movies, going global and hitting the U.S.
charts. But Chou seems indifferent to learning English, unconcerned
with the producers who beseech him to make a film and, finally, more
comfortable and less anxious with the demands of his celebrity. He
is growing into the role now, his diao, apparently, has taken him
this far and he has learned to trust it. There will be enormous
demands placed on this 24-year-old, forces of commerce tugging at
him to do this commercial, that magazine shoot, this action picture.
Kung fu master or rogue cop? R. and B. or hip-hop? Nike or Adidas?

He shakes his head. The first thing he's going to do is head back to
that Taipei studio, to that little nook behind the sofa, where he
will lie back, take a nap, and dream up a few more tunes.


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The Elvis Factor
Big king, little king
By Kate Drake Hong Kong
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501030303/elvis.html


The similarities are eerie and undeniable. Both launched their
careers by borrowing styles liberally from black musicians. Both
played Vegas. Elvis is the King. Chou is known as a "small, heavenly
King." Elvis transcended conventional musical boundaries, and Chou
does too, boasting a strange power over fans' lives. Consider a
story posted in an Internet chat room by a group of Taiwanese nurses
who swear that Chou's music is the sole connection a comatose six-
year-old patient has with the conscious world. "The only thing
holding him up is Jay Chou," they write. "He'll respond to Jay's
songs by trying to open his eyes or lifting his legs a little bit."

Of course, Chou can't fly (neither could Elvis), but his tunes sure
get around. The Taiwanese singer doesn't speak anything but
Mandarin, yet more than 200 websites—some based in such
counterintuitive locales as Michigan and Australia—have been
established by zealous fans. Foreigners give him awards: MTV Japan
last May named him Best Asian Artist for 2002.

Even in Hong Kong, which has an oversupply of homegrown pop stars to
worship, Chou is a phenomenon. In January the local television
station TVB overlooked his citizenship and nominated him as Hong
Kong's Most Popular Artist of 2002. Perhaps more tellingly, all
37,500 tickets for Chou's recent Hong Kong concert dates were
snapped up in just 45 minutes—the fastest sellout for a Hong Kong
tour ever. College-age girls who were waiting in line, upon hearing
that all tickets were gone, burst into tears. "Jay is different from
other Hong Kong artists, who just look good and wear beautiful
things," says Joyce Ho, a 33-year-old assistant in a law office who
refuses to buy music by anyone else. "I hear his songs and forget
all unhappy things." Even Ho's four-year-old cousin can relate. He
changed his English name from Christopher to Jay as a tribute. "He
says he'll love Jay even after he dies," Ho says. See? Chou really
is Elvis.

—With reporting by Joyce Huang/Taipei