Lest anyone get the wrong idea, the crowd of 300-plus that came to the sold-out Aaron Carter concert at the Catalyst Atrium last Wednesday night were not there because they like Aaron Carter’s music. Clad in mini-skirts and glittery tops, the ticket-holders waiting outside the theater before the show huddled together in the cold, and, a bit sheepishly, checked each other out—as if they were a bit surprised anyone else was there at all.
Take, for example, 21-year-old Mariah, who declined to give her last name. “Guys, can we just talk about something, I’m gonna be real interested right now,” she said to a group of her friends, after telling me an almost certainly made-up story about losing her virginity to an Aaron Carter song. “I am a little drunk right now. Who cares? When I went to buy our tickets she was like, ‘you guys are the first ones to ever buy tickets.’ So I was like, it’s gonna be literally us three; we’re gonna have to get hammered so it’s more fun. But then there’s more people. Because it’s Aaron Carter, this is our childhood! He was our man back in the day!”
The younger brother of Backstreet Boys frontman Nick Carter, Aaron Carter released his first album in 1997, when he was just 10 years old. He’s wearing red overalls on the cover, and jumping in the air with his tongue out. At 13, he went on to release a hit single, called “Aaron’s Party (Come Get It),” which described Carter throwing a house party while his parents were out of town. His other popular song was a cover of the Strangeloves’ “I Want Candy.”
Carter’s audience was and is highly niche: “My older sister was a Backstreet Boys fan, so I felt like I needed something for myself and, like, Aaron Carter, you know?” explained Megan, who is also 21 and also declined to give her last name (“It’s a secret,” she told me).
Now nearly all grown up, the contingent of younger-siblings-of-Backstreet-Boys-fans today embraces Carter as a way to put their own stamp on the ’90s nostalgia trend. Another 21-year-old attendee made it clear she was purely here for “throwback reasons,” adding, “I don’t take him seriously right now.”
Inside the Catalyst Atrium, groups of fresh-faced young women milled about, taking goofy photos of themselves with a life-size poster of Carter next to the merchandise table. Not too long after his opening act—a young woman who goes by Brandy Smooch—Carter came onstage to shouts and cheers of “Aa-ron! Aa-ron!” from the crowd. He sang his hits—the three or four songs whose music videos graced the Disney Channel when he was 11—then spent the rest of the concert performing medleys of top radio hits from today mixed with the big hits from the late ’90s, including Bruno Mars, Robin Thicke, Nelly and the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”—the song that made his brother famous.
There was no unfriendly jostling in this audience, since it was made up almost entirely of the nicest girls you can imagine. The whole room smelled like tropical-scented shampoo. When they wanted to get closer to the stage, these girls gently tapped one another on the shoulders, like butterflies brushing past. Closer to the front, there was a little more dancing and jumping around. (After the show, I overheard someone say, “It was moshing but, like, polite moshing.”)
After singing several cover songs, Carter told the crowd the next song would be his last. “This is my new song. I recorded it earlier this year,” he said, “It’s called ‘Where Do We Begin.’”
The song begins with upbeat guitar strumming—by his band, all men a couple decades older than Carter—then Carter sings, “Summer’s almost over now, and I’m gonna miss your smile, you’re beautiful just like a rose,” and so on.
By the time the chorus hit, a third of the crowd had already left the theater. There was no encore.
