MUSIC REVIEW; So Sweet, So Smooth, Such a King of Canto-Pop

Pop music has always been a benign invader, plundering and homogenizing wherever it treads. It takes rock, jazz, salsa, rhythm-and-blues -- whatever -- and cleans it up and smooths out the wrinkles, sometimes for the worse (Pat Boone) and sometimes for the better (the Pet Shop Boys). When it comes to the sheer sanitization of songs, the popular Hong Kong style known as Canto-pop reigns supreme, and on Friday the genre's biggest star, Jacky Cheung, came to the Paramount for a two-night stand.

In a good year, three million copies of each album Mr. Cheung releases are sold in Asia (more than the American sales of Madonna and Bruce Springsteen's latest), and he performs a 34-night stand at the Hong Kong Coliseum. Mr. Cheung and his fellow Hong Kong pop crooners Andy Lau, Leon Lai, Aaron Kwok (all with Americanized first names, chosen so female fans can easily squeal them) are known as Canto-pop's heavenly kings. Of them, only Mr. Cheung has a voice as good as his looks, and that voice is almost invariably harnessed to soap-opera sentiments and the most manufactured, streamlined, melodic fluff in the known pop world. On Friday, he delivered a well-choreographed two-and-a-half-hour spectacle of syrupy love songs in Cantonese and Mandarin (with a few high-energy dance-rockers for spice) and myriad costume changes to a mostly Chinese and Chinese-American crowd.

As Mr. Cheung mixed catchy ballads like "Farewell Kiss" and "Loving You More Each Day" with less impressive mush from his latest album, "Oversensitive World" (Polydor Hong Kong), fans walked to the foot of the stage to present him with gifts. By the end of a song, Mr. Cheung often had multiple bouquets of flowers, a balloon and a stuffed animal or two tucked under his arm. His voice was soft and smooth, soaring romantically over the sweeping keyboards and guitars of his 12-person backup band.

Between songs, Mr. Cheung entertained the audience with humorous, scripted speeches, like one about how a e song's chorus of "na na na" sounded strangely familiar because that's the way he used to cry for milk (in Chinese, "niunai") as a child. He was the mother's boy that every mother's girl loves.