Style marker
Harmonic minor
In the late '90s and early '00s, pop songs often used the leading tone in a minor key (i.e., the note one half-step below the tonic), along with the V7/vi dominant chord to which it belongs.
Ancestors
There is [...] a tradition of pure [i.e., "harmonic"] minor modality, blues aside, in the R&B music of Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson; this is the heritage of the Backstreet Boys.
— Walter Everett, "Pitch Down the Middle", from Expression in Pop-Rock Music (2008), p. 172
References in later music
Meghan Trainor
Time Magazine: Were there any artists you were thinking about as reference points while creating [the 2016 song No]?
Meghan Trainor: Obviously we wanted that '90s feel that everybody loves and recognizes and misses.
— Time Magazine, 2016
Eminem
Despite Eminem's outspoken disdain for the boy bands of the '90s, many of his early songs inherited the harmonic minor scale from those very bands.
An anti-Backstreet and Ricky Martin
Whose instinct's to kill *NSYNC, don't get me started
Those fuckin' brats can't sing, and Britney's garbage
— Eminem, Marshall Mathers (2000)
