Jay Chou and his Chinese Pop Style Essay

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Jay Chou and his Chinese Pop Style
Stepping into the new century, a name came into people’s ears in mainland China, Jay Chou. Jay is a famous Taiwan musician, whose songs impact the new generation in the recent twelve years all over the world significantly. From young to old, a lot of people can sing his popular songs, or they can hum, whistle some parts of Jay’s songs at least. According to the official statistics, Jay produced his eleven albums that sold an amazing record of 28746167 copies in ten years, which must attribute this success to his millions of fans (Fung). This paper thus illustrates three arguments, the new Chinese element, or Chou style that Jay creates in his pop songs, the fusion of traditional Chinese instruments and…show more content…
In another song Juhuatai, or Chrysanthemum Stage, Jay even tries the major scale to implement Chinese traditional music style, but it gives a sad and depressed sense to the listeners. People treat the melody to be the soul of pop music as the rhythm of jazz music. Jay coordinates Chinese classic folk music into his Chinese style music, displaying a romantic perception. Far more than it, his use of major scale shows the simulation of Chinese style doesn’t require the pentatonic scale restrictively. But people believe his professional musical skill and the understanding of Chinese folk music are two important facts that contribute to his creative Chinese pop music style, or what is called Chou style.
Although Jay is not the first musician to use Chinese traditional instruments in the pop style music, he combines Chinese instruments, such as zheng and pipa, with western piano and violin harmoniously, in some of his works. The sounds of Chinese folk instruments pipa, flute and castanet are easily recognizable from the main melody. Musicians can perform the songs with the same melody and rhythm with different instruments, but timber is usually hard to simulate by another instrument from basic music theory. Therefore, Jay employs traditional Chinese instruments to establish the Chinese pop style in the song. But the Chinese folk instruments are not the only ones used in the performance. The combination of non-western instruments and western violin and piano, makes it
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