erickroh

The Jonas Brothers, the Beatles, Van Gogh and prolificacy

Today the Jonas Brothers release their new album, Lines, Vines and Trying Times, their fourth release in as many years, beginning with It’s About Time in 2006. An observer of pop music may scoff at such an output, deducing that Disney executives are eager to capitalize on the brothers’ success before it wanes and are therefore holding the boys to a rigorous release schedule. Well respected acts, after all, often take as long as three years between releases.

But when compared with the Beatles, the Jonas Brothers seem to be taking their sweet time. From the recording of Please Please Me in 1963 to the post-breakup release of Let it Be in 1970, the Beatles put out 13 studio albums, or almost two per year, nearly all of them classics. While the Fab Four were most prolific in their early years, perhaps goaded by record executives doubtful of the group’s staying power, they still managed to release Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper’s (1967), the White Album (1968) and Abbey Road (1969) at the rate of one album per year. The band virtually reinvented itself on each of those albums, and in five years displayed the kind of artistic development it takes some groups decades to achieve.

The creation of so many examples of art of the highest quality in such a short period of time is rare indeed. One of the few parallels may be the work of Van Gogh, whose career as a serious painter lasted roughly eight years, from 1882 until his death in 1890. Eight years! Van Gogh, too, in a small amount of time went through an artistic development that it takes some painters a lifetime to achieve. Compare the youthful eagerness and precociousness of The Potato Eaters (1885) with the adolescent awkwardness of De la Sirene (1887) with the maturity of Wheat Fields with Crows (1890), which seems to foreshadow the artist’s impending death mere weeks later.