Mariah Carey, the all-time highest-selling female recording artist, and Justin Bieber, the current teen pop icon, present a design signal with two recent and unconnected music videos. In November, Mariah released a video for her cover of the 1980s Foreigner song “I Want to Know What Love Is.” Bieber later released a video for the remix of his song “Somebody to Love.” Both recall the aesthetics of those from the early 1990s, a time when MTV and music videos were all-important in TV and music marketing. Mariah’s accomplishment, with director Hype Williams, is especially interesting. Will these videos herald a trend in 90s-retro music videos?

Many music critics, and Mariah’s fans, had claimed that she sung better at the onset of her career in the early 1990s; moreover, they said she had looked better, dressed more modestly, and they preferred her adult-contemporary material over the hip-hop infused direction she’s taken since around 1997. You Tube presentations of most of Mariah’s videos made after the early 2000s include viewer comments that “Mariah doesn’t sing like she used to” or that she’s not as attractive as before.