The younger brother of
Nick Carter of the
Backstreet Boys, Aaron first
burst onto the charts as a
precocious 10-year-old in 1997.
The next three years saw his shrill bubblegum
pop winning an increasingly large
slice of the lucrative pre-teen
market.
Carter attended
music school in
Tampa where, at the age of
seven, he joined other students in
the band Dead End. He went
solo in 1996, and the following
March was spotted by an Edel
Records' executive singing at the Backstreet Boys'
Berlin concert.
Carter's first two
singles, "
Crush On You" and "Crazy Little Party Girl", were
big hits in the teen-pop orientated European and Japanese
markets. Both songs entered the
UK Top 10, and when the two follow-up singles (
one of which was a truly awful cover version of
the Beach Boys' "Surfin'
USA") also broke into the Top 30
carter became the youngest artist
ever to achieve
four hit singles. He subsequently sang "(Have Some)
Fun With The
Funk" on the Pokemon movie
soundtrack, but his
breakthrough in his
homeland came about when he signed a recording contract with
Jive Records and released
Aaron's Party (Come Get It). Reprising the
format of his self-titled debut with a combination of weak cover versions of
lame bubblegum pop ("Iko Iko", "I Want
Candy") and formulaic new material ("My Internet Girl", "That's How I Met
Shaq"), the album was predictably gobbled up by the pre-teen market. Among the glut of glossy biographies that followed was one written by his mother and manager,
Jane Carter. Shortly after his sophomore album's release Carter entered his teenage years. It will be interesting to see how
long he both maintains his present
career path and wishes to continue to stomach the kind of
bad reviews generated by his third release, Oh Aaron.