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The most successful Whitneyesque singer is Mariah Carey. Like Houston, she'll mix ballads with synthesized dance music; she's a handsome woman with a video flair; she has a patron in Tommy Mottola, the boss of her record company who is also her husband. Carey has even outsold Houston in the 90's partly because she realeases her albums at a busier pace.
One big difference: Houston sings straight soprano with some church inflection; Carey is a coloratura. She could even be called a cubist, for she appraises nearly every note in every song from a dozen or more angles. In When I Saw You from her current Daydream CD, Carey breaks the word knew into an amazing 26 separate notes (this is only an estimate: we played these four seconds over and over, and got up to 26 just before we went mad). Her jazzy riffs suggest demon virtuosity, but it could also be musical browsing. Maybe Carey can't decide which interpretation is the right one, so she throws into them all into the mix.
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Richard Corliss; Time; August 12, 1996 issue; page 48

There's actually a picture that goes with this section of the article. The caption it: "Diva du jour {you have to know a bit of french =)}: She takes a jazzy attack on pop material; with her pipes she can do a whole song's worth of scat singing in just one note."

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