Song of the Week: "Aaron's Party (Come Get It)"

All the songs from all the weeks are HERE.

"Aaron's Party (Come Get It)"

Aaron Carter

from Aaron's Party (Come Get It)

2000

Memory is a tricky thing, so I can't say for certain what my first favorite song was (and my parents are not the kind of fucking freaks who would document such a thing). I'm sure I was bopping along to something or other in the car at age three or four. But in terms of what I remember for certain, I consider "Aaron's Party (Come Get It)" to be the first song I ever loved.

It's a funny answer to the prompt. It probably requires a little bit of humility to say that I once loved this extremely silly song. I'm okay with that. I have been fully honest and upfront with you over the years regarding the fact that I have been uncool for most of my life. In sixth grade, I was absolutely, unequivocally uncool, for many reasons. One of those reasons was that I had a cassette tape that I had recorded "Aaron's Party (Come Get It)" onto from the radio, and listened to it full blast in my bedroom.

Another reason was that... it's complicated. I wasn't popular in grade school, but I wasn't necessarily unpopular either. I was unpopular in context, I guess is a good way of putting it. My friends up to this point ended up being the so-called "popular kids" of my (small) grade school class, but because I was developing into the type of person who was not cool, it became more that I was a sort of hanger-on than anything else. Honestly, it would've been easier for everyone involved if I had just been bullied. At least I would have known my place, instead of existing in this uneasy limbo. At the start of sixth grade, however, I still thought it was important to hang out with those people, and it seemed reasonable that I could, and so I tried my best to fit in.

Occupying that weird middle ground in the social structure of my peer group was best exemplified by the fact that I had gone through basketball tryouts and found myself on the "A team" for the JV squad (fifth and sixth grade being junior varsity, seventh and eighth grade being varsity, and each level being split into an A team and B team, depending on skill level). To be clear: I was the worst one on the team, and the only reason I made the team to begin with was because there were like 28 male students per grade level in my Catholic elementary school, and pickings were slim. (Plus, I'm tall, though as the team no doubt realized that year, height means jack shit when you don't have the skills to back it up.)

I was always extremely nervous before practices, which were held every Wednesday and Friday night. I would not have been able to articulate it at the time, but pretty clearly I was nervous because I subconsciously felt that my place on the basketball team, with the ostensibly "cool kids," was an opportunity for me to prove myself worthy of upward social mobility. Which is really fucking intimidating!

So to pump myself up and to motivate myself and to give myself a little confidence boost, I would gear up and do stretches and hype myself up to the sounds of "Aaron's Party (Come Get It)." As is often the case with this type of thing, I listened at the time mainly because it was catchy, but further inspection over time has proven that it was thematically appropriate for the situation as well.

In "Aaron's Party," it is implied that Aaron is the coolest kid in school. He throws a party while his parents are out, everyone from school shows up, and Aaron is so confident in himself and his abilities that he is able to do a little dance routine during that party in his backyard, while everyone cheers him on. Aaron's cool under pressure—he doesn't freak out when an expensive lamp breaks, but instead uses the anecdote as a way to introduce himself to a cute girl. He sneers in the face of danger—when his father catches him and yells "Aaron!!!!", he pauses for only a moment, and then continues the party. But all of this is effortless too; he never has to underline the fact that he is cool and everyone around him considers him cool, because that coolness is implied.

Again, this wasn't necessarily something I would have ever thought of at the time, but it's obvious now that I wanted to be like Aaron Carter in "Aaron's Party." By listening to the song over and over again on a daily basis, it became a sort of rallying cry for a shy kid who didn't really know who he was or where he belonged. Aaron's titular party was symbolic of a social ideal that I aspired to.

You know how the story ends. While my basketball career was an unmitigated disaster, and I never quite escaped my shell before grade school ended, I did eventually find my place in the world. By the time high school arrived, I had found friends who actually wanted to "party" with me, friends who are still in my life to this day. I wasn't necessarily cool, but I was eventually confident in myself, and especially in who I was and who I wanted to be. And yeah, man, I had a few parties while my parents were out for the night, so there's that too.

My love for "Aaron's Party" faded when I changed in this manner, because I no longer needed the song. Carter was selling the idea of being cool, but after a while, coolness revealed itself to be a construct, easily disassembled.

However, I will always be thankful for its place in my story. Any song that is able to give that much confidence to someone so insecure deserves to be honored. It is a stupid, silly, juvenile song, but then so too is childhood stupid, and silly, and juvenile, and I refuse to dismiss the experience outright.