Brandy and Monica recreate ‘The Boy Is Mine’ 23 years later

If you thought that Brandy and Monica’s Verzuz battle was the only reunion we were getting, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. The pair reunited on TikTok on Thursday to bring their classic collaboration back to life once again.

It was 23 years ago when “The Boy Is Mine” climbed the charts and had everyone reenacting the music video, fighting over who gets to be Brandy and who gets to be Monica in the duet. Brandy and Monica proved that 23 years later, they’re still fighting over this mystery man. 

The singers took to TikTok to recreate the opening dialogue from their famous 1998 collab with a split-screen, socially distanced reenactment. The clip shows Brandy on the left, wearing a black fedora and a turtleneck, and Monica on the right in a cozy bathrobe monogrammed with “M.” Where can we get one?

Brandy and Monica both lip-synced their intro to the Grammy-winning R&B hit. “Excuse me, can I please talk to you for a minute?” Brandy started. “Sure, you know, you look kinda familiar,” Monia replied. “Yeah, you too. But I just wanted to know, do you know somebody named… you know his name,” Brandy said. What is this man’s name? We’ve been wondering for 23 years! 

After Monica hung up on Brandy, the “Full Moon” singer ended her video with a finger snap to let everyone know the boy is still hers. “Love you Mo. This was fun,” Brandy added on TikTok.

The surprise recreation comes after the two reunited in late August during Timbaland and Swizz Beatz’s Verzuz series. It marked the first time that the two singers were in the same room together for almost a decade. They addressed their past tensions stemming from the hit collab.

In August 2019, music producer Dallas Austin revealed that Brandy and Monica hadn’t met in person before “The Boy is Mine,” and they recorded their parts separately. The first time they actually saw each other to do it was at the American Music Awards or something,” he told DJ Vlad. “Before they could even get to the stage, Monica decked her in the face.”

“I wanted to speak to you face to face,” Monica, 40, said to Brandy during their Verzuz battle. “The more we’re talked about, the more it came to be difficult, unnecessarily. And I really really am a straight shooter, and I really do admire what you’ve done musically and what you’ve had to endure personally.”

Brandy, 42, said that she has “the utmost love and respect” for Monica. “For somebody to start at 12 years old... The longevity of your career, nobody [knows] what you’ve been through,” she added.

The pair revealed that they hadn’t spoken to each other in 8 years before the battle. The Brandy and Monica reunion brought out 6 million viewers across all platforms.

"The Boy is Mine" was the lead single on both singer's second albums, Brandy's Never Say Never and Monica's The Boy Is Mine. It earned both of them their first Grammy for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals in 1999.

This isn't the only trip down memory lane that Brandy's taken us on recently. Disney+ began streaming the 1997 film adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella, starring the "I Wanna Be Down" singer as the princess and the late Whitney Houston as her fairy godmother. In honour of the drop, Brandy recreated a medley of the film's songs with Todrick Hall. 

She also joined Whoopi Goldberg, Bernadette Peters, Victor Garber, Paolo Montalban and the rest of the cast recently for a virtual reunion hosted by Entertainment Weekly. Brandy spoke about the importance of the film's legacy. "It was a game-changer, like it was just so different, and it just gave everyone an opportunity to just play these iconic characters, and see it in a different way. It was just so magical," she said.

"It was an honour to be part of something so wonderful back then, and even now, and it was multicultural, and it was just so wonderful that children were watching it could just enjoy it and all the different kinds of people that were in it, and not even question it," Peters added in the reunion video.

If you want more of Brandy's Cinderella, check out this etalk story where 12 Black women reflected on the movie's legacy, sharing the cultural significance of the film and discussing how Brandy pulled off the "impossible."

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