I know you've studied boy band kind of things in regards to media interpretation, how did you feel about the Joe Jonas piece?
It’s absolutely what I would expect to hear from him. One of the people I interviewed for a project a few years ago performed with the Jonas Brothers in their early/Veronicas era, and also had worked with Disney around the same time, and they said very similar things about being forced into a suspended adolescence and having a lot of guilt about having to project an image of virginity/abstinence/sobriety to the point of it causing some issues with real life. 2007 was a major turning point for Disney in how it handled its stable of acts, largely in response to the Vanessa Hudgens nude photos, and it was a really negative thing for all of them, as far as I’ve ever heard.
I do feel like Joe glossed over a lot of current happenings/rumors, but I don’t blame him, if he’s trying to restart his career. I also think that it’s really interesting how much you can still see Disney’s media training in all of his answers even though he talked about hating that training and wanting to be more genuine/honest than he used to be allowed to be. It’s a really ingrained regimen, like brainwashing, and I think it’s just… interesting how you can always tell when someone got the Disney Channel Original Star treatment, even years later. (Even with, say, Miley’s Rolling Stone interview.)
IDK. It read like a very familiar piece and a very familiar scenario to what a lot of former boy banders I’ve interviewed have said, and that makes me really sad. Even though I obviously feed the machine in a big way, I always wish that the machine took better holistic, genuine CARE of the people it turns into cogs. That’s why I Worry About Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson/Zayn Malik/George Shelley/etc. all the time. I’ve never heard, done, or read an interview with a former teen popstar who wasn’t fucked up.
