Title: Pre-teen idol Carter's Winter Party was largely harmless dance-pop frolic
Source: The Louisville Scene
Source: http://www.louisvillescene.com/music/concerts/2002/20020310carter.html
Date: March 10, 2002
Author: Scott Robinson, The Courier-Journal
Topic: Winter 2002 Concert Review
When my oldest daughter was still a toddler, we noted that children are born to dance.
A crowd of 8,000 testified to that truth at Freedom Hall last night, never sitting down once as pre-teen idol Aaron Carter rocked the house with his Winter Party.
Lindsay Pagano opened the evening with a 30-minute set; Dream Street, originally scheduled to perform, did not appear.
That gave Carter all the more room to shake the house, with his bemused four-piece band and five dancers.
Tearing through hits from his new album "Oh, Aaron," Carter pranced around a stage with an arctic motif, serving up "Baby, It's You," "Bounce," "Hey You" and other dance tracks with tremendous energy.
Dressed and groomed like a mother's worst nightmare, Carter was a tornado, whirling around the multi-level stage through "Not Too Young, Not Too Old," "That's How I Beat Shaq" and other synchopatia. Stylistically, Carter is not too far afield of older brother Nick, a Backstreet Boy: it's all digital dance pop, with traces of rap.
It's great fun if you're a pre-teen, and appropriately harmless (there are few things more harmless in nature than white rap). Dick Clark could have emerged at any moment; even Big Bird would not have seemed out of place.
The show's one moment of substance came in the form of Carter playing a white piano with a reading of John Lennon's humanist anthem "Imagine," an unusual and politically incorrect choice that had a few parents scooping up their children and leaving.
It all looked great, it sounded great, the kids went nuts and everybody got home at a decent hour. It was more rigidly programmed than an ATM, and more than a little empty-headed, but this crowd was far too young to care.
Lest this seem inconsistent with the negative appraisal of N*SYNC expressed in these pages last year, we point out that it's one thing to indulge in this kind of innocuous fun when you're not yet in high school; it's another to still be doing it when you're pushing 30.
So we end up giving Carter's show a hearty endorsement. It's a snack parents can feel good about as part of a balanced musical diet. Let them go nuts, hug them every day and make sure they get plenty of Beatles. . . .
