Monica & Brandy “It All Belongs To Me”
Fourteen years after playing tug-o-war over a shared guy on “The Boy Is Mine”, a major R&B event at the time that resulted in a thirteen-week-long Number One Pop smash and Best R&B Performance By A Duo or Group Grammy score, the now-thirty-something divas Monica and Brandy leave the cattiness behind to lean on each other over new boyfriend woes (though, thankfully, with different dudes this time) on new duet “It All Belongs To Me”.
Equally fed up over partners who just aren’t satisfying their relationship needs (“Loving you is hard/ I feel like I’m about to hurt myself”, “It’s like you got no heart/ Cold as ice, and nothing can make you melt”), M&B decide they’re better off living life solo, sparking a good ol’ fashioned kick-em-to-the-curb session in which they snatch back everything they paid for (including “those clothes, those cars, those rings” and, yes, “That MacBook”, which is hilariously followed by “So log off your Facebook”) before sending their respective dudes on their way.
For all the collaboration’s pluses though (including some stellar, church-raised-showcasing vocal work from each singer, and a smoove piano-based shuffle by producer Rico Love–who deserves special kudos for not going the easy-hit route and having Brandy and Monica drowning in Auto-Tune over some club-ready Euro-cheese), “Belongs” ultimately feels a bit lackluster, with most of the womp-womp found in so-so lyrics that beg for either more details in the drama (the reasons for M&B’s annoyance read waaaaay too generic) or a butt-load more WTF campiness to accompany the few stray S-words and that lone, awesomely absurd, “Facebook” line.
Sure, the girls still sound great together and we’ll be happy to see this thing win big on the charts (and give each singer the career boost their still-strong respective talents deserve), but for “It All Belongs To Me” to truly be the “Boy Is Mine” follow-up we were anticipating, a killer remix, preferably penned by an R. Kelly, Frank Ocean or The-Dream, needs to be the next move.
Single drops February 14th.
