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.