From “King of Mandopop” to the New “Kato”: Jay Chou’s Transnational Stardom and His Brand of Coolness

Abstract

This chapter probes the vocal and lingual performances of Jay Chou, a top-selling Taiwanese musician who ventured in Hollywood as a film actor-writer-director. Dubbed as “New King of Asian Pop,” Chou is celebrated for his cool image and unique music style, characterized by wordless vocables, nonsense syllables, and unclear articulations. Transiting from Mandopop to film and then from Chinese-language cinema to English-language cinema, he develops a screen image which associates with his private life and continues his vocal style. Moreover, as Chou gains fame through his Hollywood vehicles, he contends his media vigor that wavers between the competence of speaking English and Mandarin, generating what I call “almost”-bilingual persona in the Anglophone world. Chou is, hence, a telling example of how a famed border-crosser occupies a uniquely productive vocal space where foreign tongue and mother tongue, and articulateness and wordlessness, coexist.