“Jealous” by Nick Jonas, Thursday, September 19, 2024

 

In 2013, the Jonas Brothers decided to stop making music together. The eldest brother, Kevin Jonas appeared in a reality TV series about his married life with his wife Danielle Jonas. The middle brother of the trio Joe Jonas formed a band called DNCE. Nick Jonas, the youngest member of the family trio, got involved in several ventures. He guest-starred in a few television episodes and was hired as the musical creative director on his friend Demi Lovato’s Neon Lights Tour. After the tour, he was cast in the boxing drama Kingdom. In 2014, he released his second album, X2, which completely rebranded the singer from a squeaky-clean teen heartthrob to a sexy twenty-something.

YOU’RE TOO SEXY, BEAUTIFUL. In 2005, a year before The Jonas Brothers released their debut album It’s About Time, Nick Jonas released a Christian self-titled album as Nicholas Jonas on Columbia Records’ Christian division INO. The album is now out of print and unavailable on streaming services. Nick also released the album Who I AM in 2010 with a band called Nick Jonas and the Administration. Both of these solo attempts and arguably the Jonas Brothers before their reunion in 2019, can be considered to lack critical approval and were somewhat marked by the artist's lack of maturity. Nick Jonas’s 2014 X2 album was an attempt to shake off the youthfulness of the singer's Disney Channel and conservative Christian reputation. The album was prefaced with press about Jonas’s role as Nate Kaluna in the drama Kingdom. Nick’s role was nuanced. Nate was a young boxer growing up in a family of boxers and toxic masculinity. Along with the pressures to follow in his father’s footsteps, Nate struggles with his sexuality, eventually coming out as gay. Corresponding with the role of Nate Kaluna, Nick Jonas was a centerfold model for several LGBTQ+ magazines including Out and Attitude. Nick Jonas essentially came out as an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, a fete controversial both in the community as some argued that Jonas was queer-bating and among his stanchly Christian fanbase.  

EVERYBODY WANTS A TASTE. Nick Jonas’s album X2 didn’t explicitly build on the queer themes in Nick’s acting career or his modeling. Instead, Jonas comes off as a jock-bro R&B singer as he explores lyrics dealing with love, sex, and jealousy. Nick’s reintroduction to solo work assumes the gospel of Justin Timberlake’s Justified as a template of escaping boy band cleanliness: amplify sexual lyrics. Nick’s solo career, though, we never to the level of success that Timberlake achieved. Jonas’s highest charting songs come from X2. His biggest song was the second single, “Jealous.” Nick’s smooth vocals and his sexy music video look distract from the song’s message. Jonas told Just Jared: “‘Jealous’  was inspired by a feeling I think a lot of people have but are afraid to admit, especially guys. But just that thing of puffing your chest up every once and a while when someone looks at your girl while you’re with them. Not only is it disrespectful, but you feel like you’re ready to go. At the time I wrote and recorded it, I was in the middle of all the training for Kingdom, so I was really sort of hyped up on testosterone.” (Italics supplied). The song is a bro-anthem that is supposedly directed to his supermodel girlfriend at the time Olivia Culpo. “Jealous” is a song about the lack of control a person feels when a lover enjoys the glances of another potential suitor. It’s kind of toxic how the speaker even admits, “You know I get excited / When you get jealous too.” Not a great relationship dynamic. 

Read “Jealous” by Nick Jonas on Genius.