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Jay Chou's latest album out in September
by kelvin@multistars - 27th July 2006
The summer of Chinese albums nowadays has become Jay's back garden. Every summer, the matter the media and fans take notice of most is what homework he hands in. On the 1st of September, his latest album will be out in all of Asia. The other young artists like S.H.E. and Gigi Leung have already released their own new albums as an early warm-up for the summer.
Even though the last album "November's Chopin" was criticised for lacking new creativity, it was repeating himself. But in fact since Jay came out he has already tried a lot of styles of music, not to mention the fact that he has a good song for each kind of style.
This time creating his latest album, because Jay was unhappy with the paparazzi watching him every moment. He once planned to write another song with the topic of the paparazzi.
But he revealed that this time there will be no song about the paparazzi, instead he has recorded songs mainly with the style of American street hip hop. A few days ago Jay was in Lin Kou A Rong set filming a new MV. In order to create the feeling of American street hip hop, he spent TW$1.5 million to build the stage from Broadway, he also hired a graffiti artist to spray the background of the American street on the wall, he hopes the visual feel of new album will give the fans a new feeling.
It is inevitable that Jay's style, which is mainly of American street hip hop, will be compared to Leehom Wang's Chinese hip hop. Besides Leehom, David Tao will be releasing his new album just before Jay. Such a close collision will certainly cause even greater comparisons to be made. Last year there wasn't any big names when releasing his album, this year the pressure on Jay has greatly increased.
Even though Jay revealed that his album will be mainly in the style of American hip hop but when being interviewed he expressed: "Every time I release an album, I will think of a lot of people, I will think about whether or not this style for the album has a market, if it will sell well and if it will get copied", this is confirmed in his previous albums. Apart from the songs being called "Jay style tags", he is also very good at writing little pop songs and also traditional Chinese style works. "Fine Day" and "Clear Stars" is still the definite selections for k songs for fans. "East Wind Breaks" and "Hair Like Snow" became hot songs as soon as they came out.
This album is forecast to continue the convention that each style is equally distributed in each of Jay's album, and also in these few years Jay has written theme songs for movies such as "Huo Yuan Chia". He was responsible for the music part of "Initial D", which he starred in. This time he is in Zhang Yi Mou's "City Full Of Golden Armour", naturally according to convention he will write a song for the movie. In order to match this ancient Chinese movie, Jay will take up his Chinese style to write for the movie.