In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
The Jonas Brothers got me into an emo festival once, or at least their publicist did. In 2006, I took a bus out of Port Authority and spent a whole weekend at Bamboozle, a marathon of MySpace-era guyliner emo that brought tens of thousands of kids to the Giants Stadium parking lot. I wasn’t especially fond of that kind of music, but I thought it would be fun to write about, and I was right. At that point, Columbia Records was trying to figure out how to market the Jonas Brothers, a kiddie pop-rock family act who looked like a boy band but played their own instruments. Part of that initiative evidently involved getting the brothers booked at this giant emo festival and inviting a Village Voice writer out to witness the entire thing.
So the Jonas Brothers’ reps were the ones who hooked me up with my festival passes that weekend. This was bad rock-critic etiquette on my part, but I didn’t actually watch the Jonas Brothers. They played on some peripheral stage at some ungodly early-afternoon hour, and I was probably watching Silverstein or Hawthorne Heights or whoever else was playing the main stage at the same time. I was like, “Sure, I get it. They’re the new Hanson, but they don’t have an ‘MMMBop.'” A couple of years after that festival, the Jonas Brothers finally broke through — not as emo-adjacent kids but as fresh-faced children’s entertainers who were happy to jump into the Radio Disney ecosystem with both feet. More than a decade later, the JoBros pulled off something that none of the other acts on that Bamboozle lineup, even headliners Fall Out Boy and Taking Back Sunday, ever managed: They scored a #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. After all those years, they finally found their “MMMBop.”
It took a serious charm offensive to get the Jonas Brothers to #1. The group had to fizzle out, break up, and reunite. Two of the three brothers had to score big hits outside of the group’s context, and then they had to weaponize the nostalgia of younger millennials everywhere when they got back together. The online gossip churn helped out, too. At that time, all three Jonas Brothers were romantically involved with women who were famous in one way or another, and all three of those women were down to look glamorous in the video for the group’s comeback single. That single is a mercenary confection, made with assistance from a whole crew of ultra-successful behind-the-scenes types, and it was laser-targeted at the pop mainstream during a moment when the pop mainstream actually had some juice. The group’s return was an impressive feat of marketing, even if it didn’t result in a particularly memorable song. But that was par for the course with the Jonas Brothers, a group who always had everything going for them except great songs.
Despite what I said up there, the Jonas Brothers never truly had an “MMMBop.” The Hanson comparisons were inevitable — three fresh-faced kids, all brothers, making scrubbed-clean and vaguely retro bubblegum for an audience about the same age as the brothers themselves. But “MMMBop” is an eternal banger, and if the Jonas Brothers have one of those, I haven’t heard it. The more accurate comparison point might be the Osmonds, another stealth-Christian family act who could be held up as a not-explicitly-churchy alternative for parents who worried that their kids’ popular-culture choices were getting a little too godless. But the Jonas Brothers never had a chance to work off of a Jackson 5-style blueprint, the way that the Osmonds did. The JoBros honestly never had a “One Bad Apple,” either.
All three Jonas Brothers grew up in a very churchy family in New Jersey. (The roll call: When eldest brother Kevin Jonas was born, the #1 song in America was Michael Jackson’s “Bad.” It was Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting” for Joe and Boyz II Men’s “End Of The Road” for Nick.) They’ve got a younger brother who isn’t in the band, which allowed the delightful phrase “Bonus Jonas” to enter the lexicon. Frankie Jonas is a grown man with an actual name and a personality of his own, presumably, but who can resist a rhyming nickname that reduces an entire human being to rimshot footnote status?
The Jonases’ parents are both musicians, and their father was a minister in the Pentecostal denomination known as the Assemblies Of God. The Jonases’ mother homeschooled them, and all three of them were show-business kids who had some early success — Kevin in TV commercials, Joe and Nick on Broadway. Nick, the youngest of the three canonical Jonas Brothers, was also the first to get into songwriting. In the early ’00s, Nick was about 10 years old, and he had a spot in the Broadway cast of Beauty And The Beast. That’s when he wrote and recorded a Christmas song called “Joy To The World (A Christmas Prayer).” Don’t listen to that. It stinks. The song came out on a Broadway compilation, and it caught the attention of Columbia Records. 11-year-old Nicholas — he was Nicholas back then — released his self-titled debut album in 2004, and it didn’t go anywhere. Nick’s older brothers co-wrote some of the album’s songs and sang some backup vocals, and Columbia boss Steve Greenberg liked the idea of putting the three of them into a group. They thought about calling themselves Sons Of Jonas for a minute, but they wisely went with the Jonas Brothers name instead. Nobody wants to listen to no damn Sons Of Jonas.
The Jonas Brothers went out on the road with other kiddie-friendly acts like the Backstreet Boys and Kelly Clarkson while working on their 2006 debut album It’s About Time. That record has one song, “I Am What I Am,” written by the late Fountains Of Wayne co-leader Adam Schlesinger, which is kind of cool. It’s one of the lesser efforts from Schlesinger’s songwriter-for-hire days, but it doesn’t suck or anything. The album also has a couple of covers of Busted, a British bubblepunk band that was briefly huge in the UK but that never did anything in America. That gives a pretty-decent image of the kind of old-school power-pop thing that Columbia wanted to do with the Jonas Brothers. They were a boy band, but they played guitars instead of doing choreographed dance moves! Also, they wrote their own songs sometimes! They came up with lead single “Mandy” on their own, without help. Surely, they’d be beloved among pre-teen pop kids and among the emo fans who went to Bamboozle! It didn’t work out that way. It’s About Time bricked, and none of its songs sniffed the Hot 100, at least at first. “Mandy” isn’t terrible, though.
By the time that Columbia dropped the Jonas Brothers, the three kids were already getting involved in the Disney universe. In 2006, they contributed a really annoying cover of “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life For Me),” from Pirates Of The Caribbean, to a Disney compilation — it sounds like Muppet Babies Dropkick Murphys — and did the theme song for the short-lived Disney Channel cartoon American Dragon: Jake Long. In 2007, the JoBros basically got their own episode of Hannah Montana, and they teamed up with past and future Number Ones artist Miley Cyrus on a song called “We Got The Party.” It’s not the best Miley Cyrus song with the word “Party” in the title — not even close — but it’s a perfectly sturdy piece of Disney-pop. Very quickly, the Jonas Brothers signed to Disney’s Hollywood Records imprint and launched a Disney Channel reality show called Living The Dream. Right away, Disney plugged these three brothers into the kid-culture industry that the company was pushing on the planet. The Jonas Brothers became megawatt stars to kids under 12, and that worked just fine for the group, even if the rest of the world had no idea who they were.
When Disney threw its machine behind “Year 3000,” one of the Busted covers from It’s About Time, the song crashed onto the Hot 100 and peaked at #31. Disney used that song to launch the Jonases’ self-titled sophomore album, and they sent the kids out on a never-ending promotional blitz. If the Bush-era White House needed some kids to show up and sing the National Anthem at a family-friendly event, the Jonas Brothers were happy to be of service. The album went platinum and sent a few other tracks into the Hot 100. Nick Jonas wrote “SOS,” another of those singles, and it did even better than “Year 3000,” going all the way to #17. Within a very particular slice of the population, the Jonas Brothers were now pop stars.
In 2008, the Jonas Brothers starred in Camp Rock, a Disney Channel original movie that was pretty much written just for them, and about nine million kids tuned in. Camp Rock also served as a vehicle for Demi Lovato, another kid who was being pushed toward stardom in the Disney Channel system. (Lovato’s highest-charting single, 2017’s “Sorry Not Sorry,” peaked at #6. It’s a 6.) “Play My Music,” a Jonas Brothers song from the Camp Rock soundtrack, reached #20, and Joe Jonas actually made it into the top 10 before any of his brothers did. The movie’s big romantic centerpiece is “This Is Me,” a duet from Joe and Demi Lovato, and that song charted all the way up at #9. (It’s a 7. I am mostly helpless to resist that kind of shiny-sincere inspirational number.)
The Jonas Brothers’ rise was accompanied by all the stuff that we expect from a big teen-idol moment — the hordes of screaming girls, the tidal waves of online snark, the sweaty attempts to insist that this whole phenomenon had nothing to do with young people’s sexual awakenings. The brothers famously wore purity rings, reassuring the parents of the world that they were not, in fact, desperate to fuck something, whether or not they gave off persistently horny vibes. Nick dated Disney stablemate Miley Cyrus for a minute. Joe became Taylor Swift’s first celebrity boyfriend, and he ensured that he’d become the subject of a good handful of songs when he broke up with her over the phone.
The Jonas Brothers made the most of their peak-hysteria moment. A few months after Camp Rock aired, they released their third album A Little Bit Longer. Even their record titles were horny. On that record, the JoBros left their quasi-punk ingredients behind for Maroon 5-style ProTools disco. The sound of lead single “Burnin’ Up” isn’t terribly different from the one they finally took to #1 with “Sucker” more than a decade later — squeaky vocals that nod in the general direction of R&B, processed guitar crunch, sleek sorta-funk drums, an airless computerized gleam on everything. But “Burnin’ Up” is way, way shittier. I hate to get snobby about pop music in a column that’s basically a years-long celebration of pop music, but “Burnin’ Up” sounds like every snob’s nightmare about what pop music actually is. The bellowed hypeman vocals from some anonymous rapper are so clumsy and awkward that they’re almost avant-garde. “Burnin’ Up” went all the way to #5, and it was the Jonas Brothers’ biggest hit for a long time. (It’s a 2.)
A Little Bit Longer went platinum and sent one more single, “Tonight,” into the top 10. (“Tonight” peaked at #8. It’s a 4.) The Jonas Brothers toured arenas, and a 3D-movie version of that tour earned about $30 million in theaters in 2009. The trio got nominated for Best New Artist at the 2009 Grammys, and they lost it to Adele. That year, they voiced CGI characters in a Night At The Museum sequel, and Kevin Jonas, the oldest of the three, got married. A few years later, he and his wife Danielle starred in the reality show Married To Jonas. It’s hard to maintain Disney-idol status when you’re going off and getting married, and the JoBros shot for something resembling maturity on their pretentiously titled 2009 album Lines, Vines And Trying Times. It didn’t work. Lead single “Paranoid” peaked at #37, and the LP didn’t sell. A Camp Rock sequel came out in 2010, and that was it for the Jonas Brothers for a while.
While things went downhill for the Jonas Brothers, Nick Jonas formed a side-project band called Nick Jonas & The Administration. They put out one album in 2010, and their debut single “Who I Am” peaked at #73. In 2011, Joe Jonas attempted to move into the R&B-heartthrob lane on his solo album Fastlane, and that was not the right call. Joe co-wrote and co-produced his lead single “See No More” with Chris Brown, someone who’s been in this column a couple of times, and it peaked at #92. That was Joe’s last time on the Hot 100 as a solo artist. The Jonas Brothers made some attempts to get back together and record a new group album, but they abandoned their efforts halfway through. “Pom Poms,” which would’ve been their comeback single, peaked at #60. The moment was over, and the Jonas Brothers all attempted to relaunch careers outside the band.
Kevin Jonas never went solo; he just did his reality show and went to school for music production. Nick had a pretty decent run, though. He released a self-titled solo album in 2014 — not Nicholas Jonas but Nick Jonas — and reestablished himself as a not-terrible maker of Charlie Puth-esque R&B-flavored basic-white-guy pop. Over a couple of years, Nick released two albums and sent a handful of singles into the top 10. “Jealous,” the biggest of them, peaked at #7. (It’s a 6.) Nick also got a bit of an acting career going, and I thought he was reasonably funny as a generically hunky video-game character in the kid-focused 2017 blockbuster Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle.
It took a little while longer for Joe Jonas to figure his shit out, but he finally stumbled his way to success outside of the Jonas Brothers, too. Joe got together with a few wacky-character producer types and formed a band called DNCE. They didn’t last long or leave a deep discography, but they reached #9 with the horny 2015 disco-pop single “Cake By The Ocean.” That song has stuck around. Last year, I walked past a cover band as they entertained drunk tourists with a cover of “Cake By The Ocean” on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. It’s that kind of song, one that’s entered the normal-people party-music canon, and it’s probably my favorite of all the hits that have had the name “Jonas” attached to them over the years, as long as we’re not counting “My Name Is Jonas” or whatever. (It’s a 7.)
Thanks to “Jealous” and “Cake By The Ocean,” two of the three Jonas Brothers successfully reinvented themselves as something other than past-tense child stars. They were still tabloid-famous, too, which helped keep their profiles up. Joe Jonas dated a bunch of celebrities, and in 2017 he got engaged to Sophie Turner, Sansa Stark from Game Of Thrones. A year later, Nick Jonas got engaged to Priyanka Chopra, the former Miss World who became a big star in Indian movies before taking the lead role on the American TV show Quantico. Maybe that fame and success is what allowed the Jonas Brothers to reunite without looking too desperate. They started teasing their return late in 2018, and they apparently played a bit of their comeback single “Sucker” during an installment of James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke. (I say “apparently” because I ain’t watching all that.) Finally, the Jonas Brothers were ready to unleash “Sucker” upon the world in March 2019. The song debuted at #1. A decade and a half into their career, the Jonas Brothers had their biggest-ever hit.
They weren’t taking any chances with “Sucker.” The song is a pure, naked example of the 2019 pop song-machine at work. All three Jonas Brothers have writing credits on “Sucker,” and they share those credits with five different well-paid pop-insider types. “Sucker” has no real genre. It has guitar riffs and R&B-adjacent falsetto vocals and energetic drum action and whistling. It’s not a song about anything. It expresses nothing. It’s merely a sturdy-enough hanger for a brand, which is what the Jonas Brothers were. The JoBros needed to sell themselves as a product, and “Sucker” worked well enough for that. It would’ve probably worked just as well for Disney, or Target, or Lockheed Martin.
I’m probably being needlessly cynical here. All pop music exists to move product; that’s not the Jonas Brothers’ fault. The truth is that “Sucker” has hooks. In fact, it’s almost nothing but hooks, though I think some of those hooks work better than others. The song moves along with energy, and there’s a certain satisfaction in hearing all the pieces click into place like Legos. Both Nick and Joe Jonas have a slick little strut in their vocals that wasn’t there when they were kids; certain aspects of life get easier when you stop having to pretend that you don’t want to get laid.
“Sucker” fits right into an established lane, one that exists just to the left of what Maroon 5 were doing around the same time. To me, “Sucker” sounds like the wave of zippy, studio-created dude-pop that started to take over alt-rock radio toward the end of the Obama era — stuff like Foster The People and Capital Cities and Fitz And The Tantrums. Panic! At The Disco, an act that I did see at the 2006 Bamboozle Festival, had a comeback of their own with that kind of generic pop-rock. “Sucker” sounds very, very similar to “Feel It Still,” the random crossover smash that the Alaskan band Portugal. The Man snagged in 2017. (“Feel It Still” peaked at #4. It’s a 4.) Much like “Feel It Still,” “Sucker” has digital handclaps and slip-sliding bassline action and all-falsetto-everything vocals. Both songs sound like they were assembled by robots on the international space station. Portugal. The Man made fun of the Jonas Brothers for style-biting on Twitter, but they never sued or pushed for songwriting credit or anything. Good on them. If anyone in this little mini-scene tried to claim originality, they would look goofy.
As mentioned above, the Jonas Brothers had a whole lot of help in making “Sucker.” Their main collaborator was Ryan Tedder, the OneRepublic leader and big-deal producer who’s already been in this column for working on Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love.” (OneRepublic’s highest-charting single, the 2007 Timbaland collab “Apologize,” peaked at #2. It’s a 6.) In interviews, the Jonas Brothers talked about how relieved they were that they’d built up so much credibility that someone like Ryan Tedder would want to work with them, which is funny and depressing in equal measure. If Ryan Tedder is your idea of a musical paragon, I would encourage you to aim higher. But maybe Tedder should get some credit for managing to not saddle the Jonas Brothers with a sleepy ballad. Sleepy ballads are his specialty.
Lots of other people had their hands on “Sucker,” too. One of them was Louis Bell, the Post Malone collaborator who seems to appear in virtually every column these days. That guy had a run. Another co-writer was Frank Dukes, who’s been in this column for working alongside Bell on Camila Cabello’s “Havana“; he co-produced “Sucker” with Tedder. Homer Steinweiss, drummer for Sharon Jones’ Dap-Kings and for a bunch of other soul and funk revivalist projects, co-wrote and played drums on “Sucker.” There’s one part of the song where that guy is just going off, playing crazy-sweaty breakbeats, and someone else fucks it all up by putting whistling over the top. Please don’t do that. No more whistling in pop music. There oughta be a law. Anyway, the last of the “Sucker” co-writers is someone even more unlikely than Steinweiss: Mustafa Ahmed, the Toronto soul-folk singer who records nakedly emotional music as just plain Mustafa. I don’t know what Mustafa did on “Sucker,” but he’s in the credits. (Mustafa doesn’t have any Hot 100 hits as lead artist, but he’s a featured guest on 21 Savage and Metro Boomin’s “Walk Em Down (Don’t Kill Civilians),” which peaked at #52 in 2022.)
All these big-deal professionals put in work, making a Jonas Brothers comeback single that never gets stuck in my head because the hook from “Cake By The Ocean” just jumps in and boxes it out every time. “Sucker” is about being a sucker for your love, and the lyrics might as well be greeting-card placeholders. The Jonas Brothers are suckers for all the subliminal things that nobody knows about you, and you’re making the typical them break their typical rules, it’s true. The song is fine, you know? But it never gets past “fine.” It never announces its need to exist in any compelling way, besides just being a slightly-more-streamlined version of the already-too-streamlined “Feel It Still.” (I do like “Sucker” better than “Feel It Still,” though.)
More than anything, “Sucker” feels like an excuse for the three Jonas Brothers to make a video where they get together with the three famous women in their lives. Director Anthony Mandler shot the clip at some famous British estate or other, and the brothers and sisters-in-law strut all over the place in outrageous fashions. As unabashed luxury-porn goes, it’s pretty fun. The brothers probably smashed the reunion button at the exact right moment. Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner messily divorced in 2023; the saga reportedly had something to do with him hearing something she said on a ring camera. They’ve got a custody battle going now. The feelgood grown-up-Jonas thing is thoroughly cooked.
In 2019, however, “Sucker” gave the reunited Jonas Brothers the launching pad that they needed. The single didn’t linger on the charts for long, but it eventually went quintuple platinum. There haven’t been any other big hits since then. The Jonas Brothers released their reunion album Happiness Begins a few months later. A few other singles from the LP charted, but none of them went supernova. (“Only Human,” the LP’s biggest non-“Sucker” single, peaked at #18.) The brothers started touring arenas and playing Vegas residencies, and I imagine that’s been quite lucrative for them.
It’s easy enough to picture the Jonas Brothers on the permanent nostalgia-tour circuit, like their boy-band forebears in New Kids On The Block and the Backstreet Boys. The JoBros might have bigger ambitions than that, though. They released a string of one-off singles after Happiness Begins, and some of them did pretty well on the Hot 100. The biggest of those songs is also the best: 2020’s “What A Man Gotta Do,” which peaked at #16. I love the audacity of trying to write a pop hit built on the Bo Diddley beat in this decade. It sounds extremely Broadway, but it’s the fun kind of Broadway.
All those one-off singles, including the JoBros’ collabs with dance producers like Diplo and Marshmello, never appeared on a Jonas Brothers LP. Instead, the Jonas Brothers followed Happiness Begins with a 2023 album simply called The Album. I hope someone paid them the big bucks for lead single “Waffle House.” I honestly can’t tell whether that song is spon-con or whether it just sounds that way. Either way, “Waffle House” peaked at #57, and the Jonas Brothers haven’t been back on the Hot 100 since then. They’re apparently making a new album and a Disney+ Christmas comedy now, but I don’t have to pay attention to those things because I am now done with writing about the Jonas Brothers. Apologies to whoever was doing the trio’s PR back in 2006. I’m late, but I got there eventually.
GRADE: 5/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s Halsey, someone who’s been in this column a couple of times, singing a weird Jessica Rabbit-ass torch-song version of “Sucker” in a 2019 visit to the BBC Live Lounge:
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s the pretty-fun pop-punk version of “Sucker” that Meet Me @ The Altar released last year:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. If you’d like to subsidize me dancin’ on top of cars and stumblin’ out of bars, please buy it here.
