The Budget Jay Chou of Around 2005

In college I heard a song. Jay Chou was huge back then… okay, he’s still not exactly unpopular, just not as huge as he used to be. I always assumed that song was by Jay Chou, because it sounded way too much like him…

The same slurred enunciation, the same pseudo-Chinese-style instruments, and most importantly, that nearly identical rhythm.

Plenty of people slur their words, plenty of people use Chinese-style instruments. What matters is that nearly identical rhythm. You could say all Chinese R&B is like that, but David Tao and Wang Leehom never sounded like that, right?

Later I found out the guy wasn’t Jay Chou at all. He was called “Hou Xian hoho” — yeah, with a “hoho” stuck on the end. I looked into it, and Hou Xian’s style was called “palace-mode R&B.” It’s actually a concept he came up with himself, describing how much ancient-style material there is in his music. Fair enough, honestly — he uses a ton of guzheng and pipa, the kind of thing Jay Chou and David Tao and Wang Leehom could never catch up to with their Chinese-style stuff.

I listened to a lot of Hou Xian’s albums in college. A guy in my dorm liked him too, so I ended up hearing a lot of it. Gradually I started to feel that Hou Xian really did have a strong style of his own. Meaning he wasn’t imitating Jay Chou — he genuinely had his own path. Some of the tracks were pretty good, and even the debut album wasn’t uniformly Jay-Chou-ish. Like I said, he used a ton of “imperial court” instruments to build the “palace-mode” R&B he wanted. For a musician, that’s already something to admire.

After that I stopped hearing about him. Then I went off to listen to Western rock, and after that JPop. Then a while back I heard that Hou Xian, after years of silence, had put out a new album with a whole new face.

Xia Wan Zhe Chang Yu (下完这场雨) is Hou Xian’s latest album. I couldn’t be bothered to read the promo material, even though Hou Xian himself says he put a lot of thought into the title track — the lyrics, the MV story, all that…

But I’m not one of those brainless fans who screams at the sight of a pretty boy, right? Even the matchmaker women keep telling me I’m an old man now, right? I’m just here to listen to music, right?

I gave the album about three listens… and it felt… awkward.

“Is this really still Hou Xian?” Is this still the Hou Xian who said he wanted to pursue “palace-mode R&B”?

Definitely not, I think. If anything… this is the budget-tier Jay Chou of around 2005, isn’t it? The Jay Chou of Still Fantasy and later Capricorn or whatever.

I can’t hear any trace of “palace-mode R&B” on this album anymore. Most of the tracks have a thick Jay Chou shadow over them.

Jay Chou eventually started enunciating clearly, and Hou Xian enunciates clearly now too. Jay Chou used a lot of guitar with a bit of erhu or a single Chinese instrument to make his Chinese-style sound; Hou Xian’s Xia Wan Zhe Chang Yu is the exact same approach — actually, didn’t Jay Chou have some song about rain that’s basically this? And the rest of the tracks on Hou Xian’s album have no distinguishing features left at all. The melodies are okay, not unpleasant, but you can find music like this all over the internet. It’s the level of being lost in the crowd.

I don’t know if Hou Xian got lost, or if he wanted to cater to the mainstream, or if he just couldn’t keep up the act anymore (malicious speculation).

Or maybe Hou Xian saw that today’s Jay Chou switched to an arranger who loves electronic music and started using EDM everywhere, so he could take the “early Jay Chou before the EDM” route to meet demand?

But is that still you? Or does Hou Xian even know who he is anymore?

Of course… I’m just an old man who likes listening to music, talking about how it feels. Those little girls who see Hou Xian and go “so handsome, so handsome” (handsome?) and think everything he does is great will probably still love it. And the album itself isn’t bad — it just lacks its own character…