Last week, Ariana Grande sprinkled a bit of nostalgia back onto the Top 100 charts with the release of a modern-day rendition of the 1998 hit single “The Boy is Mine” featuring the duet’s original singers Monica and Brandy. While walking down memory lane, Monica revealed how working on Grande’s project healed her decades-long rift with Brandy.
“The process of the new collaboration did a lot of closing the gaps,” Monica told Entertainment Tonight. “When you properly communicate, you can find not only the resolutions and solutions to problems — but sometimes you find that there weren’t ever problems, just consistent miscommunications.”
Despite their duet topping the Billboard charts for almost 13 weeks after its release, Monica and Brandy have had a notoriously strained relationship. Even before the release of their hit song, the R&B singers were consistently positioned against each other in the media, so much so that Brandy originally suggested the idea for the collaborative track to shut down rumors about the then-ingenues hating each other. While the two were reportedly friends and on the same page at the time of the single’s release, soon after, things went downhill when Monica reportedly punched Brandy backstage at the 1998 MTV Music Video Awards.
Since then, the “So Gone” and “Right There” singers have occasionally thrown little jabs at each other on social media and have had limited interactions over the last two decades. In 2020, the ‘90s R&B icons shocked fans when they faced each other in a “Verzuz” battle, which Monica says took a lot of maturity.
“It was not something that I would say was anyone’s fault,” Monica said prior to the battle at the time, per Entertainment Tonight. “We all added to it, and after a while, it became real … It’s over now. And it took very adult conversation. There’s no shame in saying that.”
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