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.