“This Is Heaven” by Nick Jonas, Saturday, March 6, 2021
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Chasing Happinessis a documentary telling the story of the ups and downs of the Jonas Brothers' career. Even though I was not a fan of the Disney Channel stars, CH was a telling human story about faith, family, and fame. Debuting in 2006, Kevin, Joe, and Nick took tween girl's hearts by storm. I was, however, within almost the right demographic to completely ignore the band's existence. While I was off at college listening to MGMT and Fleet Foxes, the Jonas Brothers meant a whole lot to the younger millennials. I say almost the perfect demographic because the band gave a lot of press to their Christian upbringing. Some of the Christian publications I read praised the young men as they wore their purity rings and kept a squeaky clean image. But there was a lot more to that story.
IF YOU TOLD ME THAT MY FATE WAS ON YOUR FINGERTIPS, THEN, I WOULDN'T BELIEVE YOU. Last week Nick Jonas hosted and performed two songs on Saturday Night Live. After being introduced by his older brother, Kevin, Nick premiered this late '80s/early '90s song, complete with a saxophone solo. Lyrically this is a love song for his wife, actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas; however, I found the use of religious imagery in this song fascinating and totally on brand of what my blog has become: processing religious trauma. One of the most powerful scenes in Chasing Happiness is when the brother go to visit their home in Wyckoff, New Jersey. The brothers' father was a minister in a small town Assembly's of God church. Their parents did everything they could to help the boys succeed in their musical career, which caused tension between the church and their minister. The brothers had a successful first album only to be dropped by their label, and to make matters worse the church fired their father and evicted them from their family home. The scene in the documentary shows that moment as pivotal in how each one of the brothers started to splinter with Christianity, even if it was still present in their careers.
Nick Jonas posing for Calvin Klein.
YOUR BODY, MY MOTIVATION. After the Jonas Brothers' hiatus starting in 2013, Nick Jonas's career began to blow up. Like many other Disney stars, he stopped making G-rated music, and he also shook off the Christian following. I mentioned the Jonas Brothers last month when I talked about purity culture. The band has talked about these rings a lot because they were asked about them throughout their career. Nick spent his early 20s embracing his role as a sex symbol. Whether it was Calvin Klein ads or shirtless photo shoots, Nick Jonas was no longer the 13-year-old star. In 2018, Nick married Bollywood actress Priyanaka Chopra, and the two have been media darlings since then. As a love song to his wife, "This Is Heaven" focuses on the here-and-now of love, rather than the heaven his father preached about. Instead of focusing on what many believe will be the soon-coming tribulation before the return of Christ, Nick focuses on how every moment in love gets better and better to the point where you can't comprehend it getting any better. And a love ballad with a saxophone solo, how could it get better?
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I've talked about how Carrie & Lowell , Sufjan Steven 's 2015 masterpiece, is a quintessential portrait of dealing with grief and forgiveness when I wrote about the first two tracks, " Death with Dignity ," and " Should Have Known Better ." By the third track on the record, " All of Me Wants All of You ," explores grief in a different way from the previous two tracks. As with most songs on the album, "All of Me" appears to be deeply personal to the artist. But being personal doesn't stop this track's language from being the most obscured with allusions to geography and possibly an allegory from a little-known Spanish play. ALL OF ME THINKS LESS OF YOU. There's a debate on Lyrics Genius about the meaning of this song, especially surrounding the identity of the only other character mentioned by name in this song, Manelich. Is he the one the song is about? Stevens has written vaguely about homosexual attraction throughout
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