Jay Chou, Fantasy, 2001
Jay Chou, Fantasy, 2001
ranking: #14 on 1993-2005 list
Fantasy (范特西) was the last time Jay Chou (周杰倫) could convince anyone he was young. After Fantasy, he became a grown man who hid in teenage clothes and pretended to have teenage dreams. On Fantasy, along with his debut Jay, Chou was the opposite: an anguished youngster who couldn’t wait to grow up and be a martial arts hero, a terror on the basketball court, or a lover for the ages. The musical quality did not diminish after Fantasy, but album #2 was surely the last time Chou the prodigy was taken seriously on a large scale, after which he became more of a commodity than a kid wonder. After Fantasy he seemed to spend all his time charming the Taiwanese media and audience, whereas on the first two albums, charm exuded from songs which didn’t even want to be charming to begin with.
Take the shocking “Dad, I’m Back” (爸,我回來了), a song that seems impossible from the Jay camp today. Not only is it partly in Taiwanese (poison for the critical mainland market), but it’s about a husband who beats his wife. Out of the rainy night intro and slow-motion cello strut, Jay takes the mic as a kid with something to say. His raps are the clearest, slowest we’ve heard from Jay, as if he doesn’t want to lose us on a single word. But what comes out isn’t merely anger — that’d be the obvious, pulpitin’ adult thing to do. There’s also a naive sense of surprise, followed by some genuine growing pains. “I heard that after a war, there’s peace / Why do I keep seeing my dad hit my mom? / Just because he gets drunk he can take it out on my mom / I really can’t bear to watch it, thinking I’m not man enough.” This is the closest 2000s Taiwan ever got to a James Dean moment. Think of Dean’s crushing introduction in Rebel without a Cause: those wails weren’t of fury, but of exasperation in the face of the adult world. As Jay raps, “So many delusions, mom always said be good, listen to dad. / Tell me, would I want to be like you?”
On the surface, the rest of the album seems the 180-degree-opposite: not the stark social realism of “Dad, I’m Back,” but the fantasy of the album title. But upon closer inspection, they’re fantasies grounded very much in the reality of being young. In other words, though there’s a lot of playacting going on, we never lose sight of the dreams belonging to the actor under the costumes. Two tracks on Fantasy borrow historical periods to nostalgically convey a purer kind of love. “Shanghai 1943″ (簡單愛) points back to that Casablanca-setting of love on the brink of social turmoil. But it starts not on the Bund, but in a remote village in the present. The youthful narrator looks around the old family home — calligraphy fading, vine-infested brick walls still standing. Suddenly, as the melody transitions into the bridge, a remarkable thing happens. “Facing the black and white photos I begin to visualize / the way dad and mom looked in that year / A lady speaking soft words of Shanghainese walking by the Bund.” Where love is real, when love was genuine, he seems to say. No detail is spared: “Old record players, leather suitcases. / Inside the metal box of postcards, a hidden rose petal.”
Jay didn’t live wartime Shanghai, and he certainly didn’t live Mesopotamia, the setting of the album opener “Love Before A.D.” (愛在西元前). Through the images of cuneiform, ancient weapons, and black diorite, Jay risked coming off as pretentious. But once again, the fantasy is grounded in the yearning of the present. Jay isn’t in B.C., but in 2001 AD, strolling through a museum with a love interest. “Offerings, alters, bows and arrows: whose past do they belong to? / I like that in this crowd you belong to me.” As in any teenage poem, the “my love for you was written centuries ago” boast risks being over-dramatic. But Jay is too sincere for that. He knows that though his deepest sentiments are timeless, his youthful voice isn’t. So instead of being a transcendent power ballad, “Love Before A.D.” takes on a mid-tempo, sputtering hip-hop beat. Jay’s spits his verses in quarter-time staccatos reminiscent of a rap flow. He may be playacting in another century, but he knows he’s just a 21st century cool kid with a crush.
The album’s boyish fantasies are more traditionally “fantastical,” as in the cartoon-gothic “William’s Castle” (威廉古堡), one of the album’s sillier moments, but which nevertheless remains frivolous enough to know to mispronounce medieval Latin as basketball court gibberish (“la la hoo!”), and including a closing hook from “Wife” (娘子), one of the best songs on Jay’s first album. “Ninja” (忍者) is a mesmerizing martial arts fantasy that, at two and a half minutes, never overstays its welcome. Musically, it’s surprisingly witty, as when he overlaps his raps with an alternating rhyming second voice: “Where? [na li?] / I was praying at the shrine when I saw a flash / Here [zhe li] / a ninja with a covered face shooting darts from a corner / In the heart [xin li] / the shogunate has reappeared.” The second voice doesn’t flow from the first, but pops out of nowhere, like a ninja on the prowl.
But it’s “Nunchucks” (雙截棍) that shines as the rap tour-de-force, as “Wife” did on Jay. As with “Shanghai 1943″ and “Love Before A.D.”, “Nunchucks” is about a kid who dreams of assuming mythical qualities. These dreams explode past the precious piano and erhu as a full-on rap-metal tremble. Nothing in Jay’s resume — or hell, in the nascent mando-pop rap canon — prepared listeners for the speed, the contrasting instruments, the totally assured syncopated flows of the opening eight lines. Or the playful consonance throughout (creating that signature Jay “mumble”) or the overlapping inner rhymes: “yi ge ma bu xiang qian, yi ji zuo gou quan, you gou quan / yi ju re mao wo de ren you wei xian, yi zai chong yan / yi gen wo bu chou de yan, yi fang hao duo nian, ta yi zhi zai shen bian.”
Given this virtuosic velocity, it’s easy to forget that Fantasy contains some of Jay’s most memorable ballads. Traditional ones too, like “Can’t Speak” (開不了口), which like David Tao’s self-titled debut album, begins with the sound of an airplane take-off and continues with the pangs of lovers separated. “Simple Love” (簡單愛) is about simple love, and unabashedly so. If “Shanghai 1943″ and “Love Before A.D.” go to the ends of the earth to express Jay’s love, the Vivian Hsu-penned lyrics here need only a flowing brook, hair blowing in the wind, and a visit to grandma’s house. A poppy, youthful beat skips throughout, as sunny in its metrical bounce as the lyrics are in their innocence. “Sorry” (對不起) is an apology with braggadocio — the sort of sua ku posturing that came to define Jay’s most juvenile tendencies. But given the context of the album, we can almost accept Jay’s apology since it’s as unabashedly kid-like as “William’s Castle” which follows it.
And then there’s “Silence” (安靜), which remains one of Jay’s most beloved ballads. In some sense it’s the most unusual track on the album. Unusual in that there are no musical or sonic adornments, no Chinese instruments or Western histrionics, no extended metaphors or Vincent Fang’s grandstanding lyrics. Just, as Jay sings in the opening lines, a piano and some strings to accompany him. Jay sings his heart out, and then throws in a key change for good measure. The “silence” of the title refers not to some void in his life or the darkness of his heartbroken spirits. Surprisingly, it’s what he wishes he could muster when a lover is leaving. “I wish I had the ability / silence doesn’t come easy. / I will learn to give you up / because I love you so much.” Musically and lyrically we know that silence indeed doesn’t come easy to a showman like Jay, and he’s proven that in his albums since. But Fantasy remains arguably his best work in no small part because it’s the last time Jay put his passion first and left the fawning to the fans.
