I'm World : About Aaron Carter

Aaron Carter was the bubblegum bad boy of the millennium and the victim of a greedy music industry.

Aaron Carter, who passed away on Saturday at the age of 34, appeared to have lived more lives than most. The singer, who is the younger brother of Backstreet Boys member Nick Carter, began singing at age seven and debuted with a self-titled album in 1997, at the age of barely nine. By the age of 13, he had three number-one albums under his belt and was Britney Spears' opening act on tour.

At the age of 14, he was chosen to play at Michael Jackson's 30th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden alongside artists like Liza Minnelli, Gladys Knight, and Missy Elliott. By any definition, that is an impressive list of accomplishments, but Carter's adult life came to be defined by his hardships, as tends to be the case with many people who find themselves in the spotlight from an early age.

Carter, who was raised in the rural community of Rockwood in east Tennessee, became known for his bubblegum sound and mini-bad boy persona around the millennium. His disheveled blond hair and Eminem-via-Dennis the Menace look stood out even in a crowded landscape of manufactured pop groups and Mickey Mouse Club graduates. He was just innocent enough to be family-friendly but just rebellious enough to become the number-one heartthrob for girls who grew up wearing bedazzled headbands and reading J-14. His music videos were outrageous and unforgettable, with settings like clubs, picture booths, street parties, basketball courts, and movie theaters that were generally reserved for adults, giving preteens the appearance and sense of a wild, isolated universe all their own.

Carter began acting in 2001, making cameo appearances on Nickelodeon's sketch sitcom All That and appearing as himself on Lizzie McGuire. Additionally, he provided the majority of the soundtrack for the box office sensation Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, as well as the theme songs for the PBS animated series Liberty's Kids. Later, he would develop a notorious love triangle with Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff, adding to his legend as a type of teenybopper Lothario. He was a proto-Justin Bieber in many ways—both good and bad—a adolescent dream to be bought and sold with what would ultimately turn out to be very little respect for his own humanity. After learning of Carter's passing, Duff posted on Instagram, "I'm profoundly sorry that life was so hard for you and that you had to struggle in front of the whole world." "You had an incredibly effervescent appeal. My teenage self loved you so much, boy.

The magnitude of Carter's career's dark side, like that of many other poster children of his generation, wasn't widely known until the relatively recent realization about how we treat those in the public eye, especially youths enmeshed in the mainstream US entertainment environment.

Around 2002, Carter left the music business as his parents sued Lou Pearlman, the late, notorious pop tycoon who was responsible for numerous boyband megastars including Backstreet Boys and 'NSync. The complaint stated that Trans Continental, Pearlman's record label and production business, had neglected to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties on Carter's debut album. Backstreet Boys and 'NSync each requested termination of their contracts in separate lawsuits. Carter's complaint was settled out of court, but his legal issues persisted when Trans Continental sued him in 2006, alleging that he breached a recording deal stated in documents he signed while he was a teenager. Trans Continental's action was later dismissed. (Years later, Pearlman entered a guilty plea to conspiracy, money laundering, and making false statements during a bankruptcy proceeding as a result of an FBI investigation. In 2008, he received a 25-year prison sentence; he passed away in federal imprisonment in 2016.)

The years that followed were characterized by professional setbacks, controversy, financial difficulties (Carter declared bankruptcy in 2013), drug abuse, and poor mental health: in 2019, he revealed that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Throughout the decade of the 2010s, he made multiple attempts to reinvent himself, returning to touring along with parts in off-Broadway musicals, performances on reality competitions like Dancing with the Stars, and his own series House of Carters. He had a widely publicized appearance on the US talk show The Doctors in September 2017, during which time he tested positive for opiates and benzodiazepines. Later that year, he admitted himself to drug addiction treatment.

He started recording music as Kid Carter in 2018 and released Love, his first album in 16 years. The latter few years of his life, meanwhile, were mostly marked by his tumultuous relationship with Melanie Martin, with whom he had a kid in 2021, and his complicated family life. He is estranged from many of his relatives and has claimed that they once attempted to place him under a conservatorship. In September 2022, Carter entered rehab for the fifth time.

The tragic and frequently revealed-too-late stories of individuals like Britney Spears, Macaulay Culkin, Amanda Bynes, Lindsay Lohan, and Demi Lovato, not to mention many others who defined their generation from an incredibly young age, continue to shed light on the underbelly of the highly profitable entertainment industry of the 1990s and 2000s. Carter belongs to a pop generation that is too old to have benefited from the compassion of increased understanding about mental health and addiction, but is also in an age range that currently engenders a tremendous amount of goodwill from those who grew up with him on their TV screens and bedroom walls.

The prevailing mood as tributes from friends, colleagues, and fans arrive from all across the world is one of pity. It shouldn't be so usual for popularity to come at the expense of humanity, as hit songwriter Diane Warren once said: "Fame at a young age is frequently more a curse than a blessing and enduring it is not easy." Hoping for a day when our child stars get to grow up and live long, fulfilling lives as standard, rather than being fortunate enough to avoid becoming a cautionary tale, is a horrible thing.