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.