Chaos at the top of the Taiwan Album Charts

There's chaos in the Taiwan album charts this week. That's Chaos (乱), the new album by Jaycee Chan (房祖名, pinyin: Fáng Zǔmíng), which climbed to the number one spot on the G Music charts last week. It accounted for a massive 27 percent of all album sales in Taiwan for the week April 25 to May 1, and 41 percent of all Mandarin album sales. Chaos displaced Together by Rene Liu after two weeks in the top position.

It's been a big last couple of weeks for the Chan clan. First, father Jackie Chan was named by Forbes magazine China's most powerful celebrity, and now son Jaycee has a number one selling album with just his second studio album. It's been a long wait between albums: his debut record was back in 2004, although he released an EP in 2007. The light output is no doubt the result of dividing his time between singing and songwriting, acting, running a company and, I guess, enjoying a multi-millionaire's lifestyle.

Twenty-seven year old Chan was born in the United States, raised first in Hong Kong and then in the US, and, after dropping out of college there, is now based back in Hong Kong. His mother is the former actress from Taiwan, Joan Lin, hence his fluency in Mandarin. His show business career hasn't exactly set the world on fire, either in movies or music. He did receive critical acclaim, however, for his acting performance in the 2006 film The Sun Also Rises, and his first album Jaycee is seriously underrated.

Sales for Chaos have been helped by the strong title track and first single. Chaos includes some older tracks from his first album, and has a few English-language songs as well as in Mandarin. Here's an album review from the Let's Spread the LOVE for Chinese Music blog (a good source for album reviews, by the way).