“Thank you so much. This is the best concert and best audience I've had in years. I love you all. Am I back? …Yeah, I'm back, baby.” – This proclamation will forever line the walls of the Majestic Theatre after the living demigod himself, Aaron Carter, uttered them on Tuesday night after his Earth-shattering performance.
Before I get ahead of myself, I'll start at the beginning. Arriving in after seeing a flyer for the party (though Aaron strangely insisted he didn't put those out), I felt like I walked onto the sight of a twenty-something's childhood memory lane pilgrimage. The venue was packed with a lot of women 25 and younger, at around an 8:2, maybe even 9:1 ratio advantage over the biologically gendered men in the audience. To think this show had more in attendance than Titus Andronicus only made sense – one band was a wisely tongued punk band with blistering rhythms and anguish-filled sensibility while the other was a single man with cookie-cutter lyrics and repetitive choruses.
But, damn, is Aaron's smile worth a million dollars. His blond tips looked frostier than Tony the Tiger's flakes. The blazer and V-neck he wore at the opening of his performance were fresher than gas station sushi. People held up signs made on the back of cereal and Slip n' Slide boxes to show their appreciation for this king of kings for even gracing us with his presence. As he drank his tea and let the lights glisten across his make-up coated face, we knew we were in for a splendiferously phantasmagorical experience.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLPpGKKV3s4
To highlight the actual performance, the man who should be nominated to run our government during its shutdown performed all of his hits (“I Want Candy,” “Aaron's Party (Come Get It)”) to louder and louder crowd singing. He, also, to show his incredible versatility, performed a mash-up of modern hits that started with “So Fresh, So Clean” by OutKast into “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke into “Treasure” by Bruno Mars and finally into “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk. If not just to make up for a small lack of material since 2003 (besides his new single, “Where Do We Begin?”), he at least showed he could sing better than Pharrell. Certainly, the apex of his performance was when after performing his magnum opus “How I Beat Shaq,” he decided to crowd surf and floated along the sea of hands, weightless like the angel he is.
At the end of the night, as a token of his hallowed appreciation to our dedication as a congregation of followers, the all-mighty Aaron rewarded us with a two-song encore that included his love ballad “I'm All About You” and some song I'm sure that most of the crowd, myself included, didn't know. Though the concert ended on that weird note, it did answer one question for me – He wasn't lip-synching. My point of realization was when, during that final number, he revealed to the crowd his humanity by doing a rather sub-par job of getting through a key change.
In the end, I feel like I am going to tell one of my roommates about how I watched Aaron Carter on his return to God-status. They'll tell me, ‘how could you be seeing AC if you're still in bed?' I'll respond to them, if this was a dream and it wasn't real…
How did I get a concert ticket with the name Aaron Carter?
Additional Odds & Sods:
– Thanks to my good friend and bona fide AC-lover Hari for attending the concert with me. When I asked her for a quote after the show ended, she said through the tears of joy, “…Good for free. A nostalgic journey through my 90s.”
– No Miles McNutt sighting at the show, but maybe I just couldn't see him through the gaggles of young women in the crowd.
– SO to my home girl from WSUM Cassie who I spotted on the top floor of the concert. I bet you were enjoying the excessive amounts of emotion-induced writhing I was doing during his performance.
– I had the unfortunate experience of having to listen to some rapper perform before St. Carter named Jason or something. The only highlight of that was the couplet “Forget what Obama say / Do what your mama say.”
– My favorite mini-scene of the concert was certainly the moment when, through the midst of “Aaron! Aaron! Aaron!” chants, came one small group of people who chanted for A$AP. Certainly a great moment of vindication.
– Eric Wiig