“The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy and Monica

"The Boy Is Mine" put Brandy and Monica face to face in 1998, a duet that kicked off both singers' second albums at once, Brandy's Never Say Never and Monica's The Boy Is Mine. Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins produced it with Dallas Austin and wrote it with Brandy, LaShawn Daniels, Japhe Tejeda and Fred Jerkins III: a mid-tempo R&B standoff between two women claiming the same man, which had critics reaching for Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney's "The Girl Is Mine".

The song cashed in on the media's assumption that the two young singers were rivals, and it paid off big: a first number-one pop hit for each of them, 13 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 and 2.6 million copies sold, making it the year's best-selling song in America. It also took home a Grammy in the R&B duo-or-group category.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.