MANDOPOP singer Jay Chou flexed his hugely influential power over the music scene this week in a demonstration that he is still the reigning “King of Asian Pop.” The 40-year-old singer released his much anticipated new single Monday night, the first single in three years, and saw it viewed over 300,000 times on YouTube in 30 minutes and crashing Chinese streaming platform QQ Music within an hour due to the heavy traffic it accumulated, a feat that had never been seen before. Less than an hour into the single’s release, the webpage on Tencent’s online music platform QQ Music displayed a message stating “an error has occurred, please tap the screen to retry,” according to Sina Tech. The single, priced as 3 yuan (US$0.45), sold more than 2.4 million copies within an hour of its release. As of Tuesday evening, the single has sold 5 million copies and is ranked the No. 1 trending video on Youtube in China’s Hong Kong and Taiwan, the United States, Canada, Australia and Singapore. But despite the video’s success, the song is met with divided opinions online, especially among critics on Douban, one of China’s largest review sites in film, TV and music. Currently, “Won’t Cry” has a 5.8 rating on Douban, based on over 26,000 reviews. It is making rounds as one of Chou’s lowest-rated singles. A message titled “What do you think about the quality of his new song?” on Douban was trending, with the netizen saying that the song “sounds bad.” Replies in the thread were also mixed, with one netizen commenting, “It sounds so bad. Can’t even cry to it.” Many netizens agreed that the song is unoriginal, but one netizen said, “Objectively speaking, it’s not as good as his older songs, but I won’t say it sounds bad.” A more serious criticism labeled Chou’s music video as promoting sexist values. For some fans, the song depicts an ancient and tired archetype of a self-sacrificing woman expected to exhaust herself in order to support her man, according to website Inkstone. In the video, the female lead, played by Japanese actress Ayaka Miyoshi, supports her boyfriend’s dreams of becoming a professional photographer by working hard at a milk tea shop. The criticism underscores a growing feminist movement in Chinese society, which is traditionally patriarchal. “After all these years, Jay Chou’s new music video shows that some men still dream of a world where a beautiful woman willingly works herself to the bone to support your dream,” wrote fiction writer Deng Anqing on a public social media post. Miyoshi’s character works overtime to save up for a Hasselblad 503 CW, a pricey medium-format film camera popular in portraiture photography, and helps her boyfriend, played by Japanese actor Watanabe Keisuke, to apply for a photography program in an art school in Britain. When it’s time for him to leave for the program, she gifts him the Hasselblad in a leather camera bag. As he looks at her from the back of a departing taxi cab, Chou sings the chorus: “You have nothing, but you still give it all for my dream.” The song’s official marketing description says “Won’t Cry” is a ballad about a sad love story that focuses on sacrifices in a relationship. “There is a kind of love called ‘I’d rather sacrifice myself than become a burden to the other.’ There is a kind of love called ‘I felt so sorry, but I just can’t do anything for her,’” says the description. On Douban, a top-rated review said the sacrifice depicted in the music video is one-sided. “Why would this woman empty herself to send her boyfriend away? This is not a love story. Real love should nurture both sides [of a relationship],” the reviewer said. “This is infatuation, as the sacrifice has dragged her into a bottomless swamp.” However the music video, which was shot in Japan, unexpectedly boosted tourism in the country. According to Chinese online travel agency Ctrip, searches for Japanese tourist attractions such as the Tokyo Tower and Sky Tree surged 80 percent overnight. Key search phrases such as “one-day trip in Tokyo” and “kimono experience” also increased by 40 percent. Special itineraries have been created to cater to the rising demand, including one-day trips in Tokyo that cover all the tourist attractions shown in Chou’s music video. Chou, born and raised in Taiwan, released his debut album in 2000. He’s a household name across the Chinese-speaking world. He’s especially well known among millennials for his love songs. (SD-Agencies) | 