In fourth grade, link my best friend Julie invited me to an Aaron Carter concert. Though I’d only heard a few of Aaron’s songs on Zoog Disney, sick when “I Want Candy” played at a friend’s Plaster Fun Time birthday party, I’d discovered my toes tapping while I painted the “BFF” letters engraved into a ceramic teddy bear’s chest. As a finishing touch I’d assaulted my work with a blitzkrieg of sparkles from an aerosol can, hoping the extra shine would detract from a faulty paint job. I was an anxious preteen with an inferiority complex, and I desperately wanted to go to this concert.
But before I could accept Julie’s invitation, my mother informed me of the vacation she’d planned for my family to Cape Cod, which she’d scheduled when Aaron would be performing in central Massachusetts. Upon hearing the news I was crushed. I called Julie to cancel with a lump in my throat, quickly ending our conversation in a mess of tears and snot and serious disdain for my dream assassinating mother. As I hung up our kitchen landline and watched the shining light of Aaron Carter slowly slip away, I vowed to never speak to my mother again. Or at least until that night, when she’d ask what I wanted for dinner.
Last last month I discovered Mr. Carter had emerged from roughly a decade’s scamper through the C-list limelight. From a mirage of cancelled reality TV shows, public battles with family and slow derailment from his Y2K teenybopper image, I learned Aaron would soon introduce himself at Brighton Music Hall for Allston’s portion of the Aaron Carter Wonderful World Tour. I learned he was back, a reclaimed man with a flawless new album. Whether or not this flawlessness was actually true didn’t matter much to me. With a nod to my past I slipped on my sketchers, hairsprayed my bowl cut and hopped on the quickest razor scooter to Carterville.
Meandering around the venue before Aaron’s set, I bumped into an acquaintance whose father had given her tickets in a completely loving and ill-informed gesture. As our conversation turned to encompass all things Carter, she told me of a prior experience seeing Aaron play a small show a few years back. He’d jumped on stage with just a laptop and a microphone, refusing to play “Aaron’s Party (Come and Get It),” “I Want Candy” or even “How I Beat Shaq.” Yelling over an opener’s deafening ballad, I told her that I’d read about Aaron’s plans for a new album. That maybe he’d only play new songs during his set. That maybe he was trying to leave his childhood image behind. She sipped her beer and shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t know what to expect, but she had seen Aaron making out with a girl near the bar a few minutes ago.
Where was Aaron now? In the time it took two openers to predictably sensationalize puppy love, a third to add a hurried rap to “All About That Bass,” and a fourth to spend more of his set trying to sell his album than actually play it, I did some people watching. Amongst an audience of drunken college girls, numerous forty-something mothers and one guy in a fedora and cargo pants, I spotted him. Like a light-weight boxer making his way to the ring, Aaron appeared in flashes. He bobbed and weaved from the front to back of the venue, speeding his way through the crowd with a girl on his arm while ducking under the brawn of venue security. I continued to watch Aaron as he retraced these paths almost frantically, moving back and forth again before planting himself in a corner to watch an opening song or two. But like some hovering butterfly to a breeze of wasted 90’s pop fans, Aaron only fluttered off again.
I breathed a sigh of relief as the last opener finished, thanking a higher power while promising the heavens to stop drinking my roommates juice and wearing the same socks multiple days in a row. As holy spirits confirmed my plea in writing, I watched asDJ D-Wreck appeared on stage and kickstarted a stream of energetic party beats alongside some extremely predictable dialogue. Asking the crowd until they screamed like raving banshees, “Are you ready to see Aaron Carter?!”
Several attempts and the last try worked, as Aaron burst onstage amid mass hysteria. At this point it seemed the frantic group had lost all memory of avoided interaction with the singer while he’d paced the venue just minutes before. And like some sad game, Aaron pretended too, smiling warmly to the audience before launching into what quickly became, good or bad, one hell of a show.
Aaron’s set started with an autotuned bang. As he crooned the opening chorus “If y’all wanna dance like hell yeah,” fans moved towards the stage in sparkly tank tops and jeggings to sway tipsily beneath a haze of colored lights and Aaron’s trademark bleach blonde halo. With an added flash of drama, two dancers flew onstage to whip their hair and shake uncontrollably in denim hot pants. Aaron continued his chorus with a nasally string of harmonies, his sidekicks tossing smiles with jazz hands and endless hip thrusts alongside him.
By his second song Aaron was sweating profusely, opting to lip-sync the words to an unreleased tune whose lyrics went something like, “Y’all rockin/mmm yeah.” I’d only realized Aaron was cheating when he spoke to the crowd with a rousing “WHADDUP BOSTON?” while vocals continued to ring out beneath his greeting. As if to distract us all from this stunt, Aaron quickly threw himself on the stage wall and gyrated against it dramatically. The audience ate it up, so much that when I moved forward in the crowd to snap a photo, I felt a body dancing against me in similar fashion. Confused, I turned to meet a girl grinding her pelvis across my lower back. As my blood pressure skyrocketed, I looked into her eyes to deliver a slew of cutting insults. What I saw was shocking. Looking back at me were eyes at all, but two sad puddles of raspberry vodka. I took a deep breath and let it slide. This girl was completely wasted.
DJ D-Wreck played Snoop Dog’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” as a sedative for the singer, who’d spent another song belting something like “Girl, he don’t know you like I do,” after prefacing the tune with a strange and off-putting declaration. Onstage, Aaron explained that his relationship with female fans was far more intimate than any partnership they could ever have with their actual boyfriends. As Aaron so eloquently stated, he was there from the start, when we were just 12 years old watching reruns of, ahem, Lizzie McGuire. Bewildered, I tried to find the logic in his reasoning, thinking back to the age he’d given fans “Crush on You,” and “Do You Remember,” a time when we were just realizing the horrors of training bras and tampons. He’d been with us through our worst, and here we were, acting so selfishly!
As the night wore on things only became more brain-numbing, more outlandish and even more intoxicated. The night’s true highlight came when Aaron sang “I Want Candy” and met the spray of SweeTarts, lollipops and birth control pills a diehard launched at the singer like bubblegum hand grenades. The single dollar she’d kept with her packaged contraception also flew onstage, along with every ounce of dignity the crowd had left at the bottom of their sugary cocktails.
As the song ended and the crowd quieted from what seemed like a fully unhinged riot, Aaron moved into what was a proclamation of his new take on life. “Standing here in front of you, I am a man with humility. A man who makes mistakes and tries to fix them. This next song… is called ‘Recovery,’ which I may name my album. It’s coming out next year.” The singer dedicated the song to his sister Leslie, who he lost to an ongoing battle with drug abuse. Though poignant, the singer quickly moved to remind fans to hashtag their photos from the night with #ACWWT. Because Instagram!
Aaron wrapped his set with his new single, “Ooh Wee,” a tune that went something like, “Every time the beat drops/shorty make my heart stop/baby make that body rock” with a few more lines about sex and dancing at the club. And sometime during the “Ohh” and “wee,” as I stood near the back of the room and watched fans dance and scream like lunatics, it hit me. I’d disliked Aaron long before he walked into the venue, before he stepped off his tour bus or posted a pic of some much needed self-care just hours before the show. There on the booze-soaked floor, a realization dawned on me like the early morning sunrise of a preteen sleepover. I disliked Aaron for representing the things I had grown up and out of. I disliked him for playing music I once loved like a good friend who moved away in middle school. I disliked him for playing the song I tapped my toes to while painting a teddy bear at Plaster Fun Time. I disliked him like I did the awkward memories I hid away with my chubby fourth grade photo.
Aaron finished his set before taking off for good. For good, that is, until it came time for his meet-and-greet. Here Brighton Music Hall staff rolled out a vinyl banner patterned with I Heart Aaron’s and #OOHWEE for sweaty fans to stand against while taking their photo with the pop sensation, who’d quickly changed his muscle-bearing tank to a subdued peacoat and scarf, despite the river of sweat visibly pouring from his hairline. Moving through the crowd towards an exit, I thought of what it would be like to take a photo with the star. I nixed the idea and chuckled to myself, leaving the venue and hitting the street’s darkened pavement. Walking home, I thought of a time so many years ago, when I desperately wanted to hear a song from the radio played in front of me. A song I knew and my friends knew, that we could dance along to in our inexperience at music and a vastly greater world. I thought of my excitement once contemplating a concert as a fourth grader. And with my ears still ringing from Aaron Carter’s lovingly forgettable music, I saw myself as a 10 year old, beaming from ear to ear.