【China Archives】

I was once proud and China Archivesam now ashamed to admit that I never used to care about the Jonas Brothers.

I was a teen during their early-2000s rise to fame, the ideal demographic targeted by their wholesome pop personas, but like the JoBros themselves would later, I was trying to distance myself from such clean-cut content. As someone who now actively advocates everyone's right to unironic enthusiasm for whatever the fuck they want (catch me counting down the days to the new Harry and the Potters album), I'm sorry to say that I scorned the Jonas Brothers and their fans. They were too popular, too obvious as objects of admiration, and as someone who wasn't particularly in tune with the music scene anyway, I could easily sit out the Jonas storm without engaging.

In the new Amazon documentary Chasing Happiness, brothers Kevin, Joe, and Nick (and their parents) describe their meteoric journey to stardom, but what completely threw me, what I could've learned if I had simply cared enough to Google them in the past decade-plus, was that their path feels inevitable. The Jonas Brothers were not bred in a lab by the Disney machine, but destined for stardom. It genuinely never occurred to me when they got famous that this was a lifelong dream their entire family was working around-the-clock to achieve.

There's home video footage in the documentary of a child Nick belting out songs at his family's piano, playing guitar from an age when I'm not even convinced he was potty-trained. The boy Joe wants to be a comedy improviser, and you see that lack of inhibition as soon as he starts contorting his face to the camera. There is undeniable talent in the trio and a warmth and charisma that clearly appealed to millions, and that mean just as much to me discovering them now because those continue to be rare traits in the wealthy, famous, and successful.

Chasing Happinessdidn't convert me into a Jonas fan overnight. Calculated or not, the boys made excellent moves over the past couple of years by dating and then marrying a perfect combination of women to completely break me. First there was Sophie Turner, my queen in the North, and then, miraculously, impossibly, global superstar Priyanka Chopra.

Because back when the Jonas Brothers were churning out studio albums and Disney Channel originals, when I was stoically ignoring them, I was still a loud, proud Bollywood fan and part of Chopra's already global audience for her emerging film career. In the fall of 2005, I saw herin concert, dancing to famous Bollywood songs with five other stars and even giving the audience a taste of her own hidden singing ability.

By the time Joe and Nick started dating their respective now-wives, I had reached a truce with the Jonii. The band broke up and their solo efforts were admirable; Kevin seemed happy to bow out of the spotlight, and Nick even took over for another of my obsessions, Daniel Radcliffe, as the lead in Broadway's How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. That part of the documentary is bittersweet, because while the brothers do find a new foothold, they're clearly unmoored without each other. I have no siblings, and the cousins I'm close with are all female, so I've always been fascinated by how brothers bond and connect.

And then there was "Sucker."

Despite the instinct to laugh at this song's audacity – this is basically a lavishly-filmed family Sunday Funday – "Sucker" slaps. It has the irresistibility that Nick and Joe brought to their solo discography and an infectious hook with the JoBro name stamped on it.

Chasing Happinessdoesn't drop any bombshells about the Jonas history, but it's a welcome crash course for a new fan. It shows that no journey to success is free of struggle, both physical and emotional, and watching the brothers grow distant is truly painful, softened only by the certainty that we know they'll end up back together, stronger than ever.

Even though I'm late to the party, I'm happy to be here. I don't mind that it took me over a decade to get to know them and their history. I love that I can hear juvenile lyrics like "I'm right / You're wrong / Move on" and roll my eyes at those kids, then jam out to an ostensibly matured "I'm a sucker for all the subliminal things / No one knows about you (about you)." I got to experience the past from the present, and that's pretty cool.

And so, over the course of roughly 90 minutes, I journeyed with the JoBros, and I like to think we all learned something about ourselves by the end. I learned that I will never be above a trend, and also that sitting out the storm is impossible because time is a flat circle and the half-life of boy band fandom is higher than radioactive plutonium.

Life is too short to not experience the simple joy of a Jonas hook or a wholesome documentary. We owe ourselves that much.

kqk

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