‘The Boy Is Mine’ @ 25

In August of 1998, the producer Rodney Jerkins took out an ad in Billboard that threw down a gauntlet in the hotly contested fight for the future of R&B. “On the edge of tomorrow today,” it read, “with the new millennium Darkchild sound.” Jerkins, who had reached drinking age just days prior, had reason to believe his would be the sound of the 2000s: “The Boy Is Mine,” his first No. 1 song on the Hot 100, was in the midst of its historic 13 week run atop that chart. 

His hit was, in some ways, unlikely. It starred two women duetting with one another — in this case, mononymous teen sensations Brandy and Monica, both of whom already had plenty of experience in Billboard’s upper echelons. The recorded feud was inspired in part as a sort of answer song to Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s 1982 single “The Girl Is Mine,” as well as by Brandy’s Jerry Springer fandom. (“It’s entertaining,” she said of Jerry Springer in 1999. “Maybe it doesn’t send out a positive message, but it entertains me. I laugh so hard.”) The single ruled the summer, and yet nothing about the simmering on-record confrontation sounded sunny or beachy. “Summer songs that make it to the Top 10 tend to be upbeat,” Billboard’s director of charts said at the time, calling “Boy” “atypical.” 

“This isn’t the obviously poppy or immediately infectious single one might have expected,” Billboard noted in its review. “But after a second spin, you won’t be able to shake the subtle hook from your brain.”

The. Boy. Is. Mine. If you were sentient during that summer, that hook is likely still etched in your brain 25 years later — whether or not you were familiar with the much-ballyhooed competition between its singers and the song’s significance as a coming-of-age declaration for both of them. If Jerkins’ beat wasn’t singular in its future-perfect aesthetic — Timbaland, Dallas Austin (a co-producer on “Boy”) and Jerkins’ fellow Teddy Riley acolyte Pharrell were among those reimagining R&B at the time — its edge was uniquely successful: The song claimed not just that genre but pop music as a whole for a new generation of hungry, hip-hop-informed producers.

He made the core of the “Boy” beat in his parents’ New Jersey basement, on an Akai MPC60 that his father bought for the aspiring producer when he was still in middle school. (In an act of saintly parental devotion, dad borrowed against his life insurance policy to afford it.) Jerkins had been a savant, fixated on making beats and writing songs to the point that he dropped out of high school at 16 to work. By 17 he had a publishing deal with EMI and a distinctive style that he summed up with his Darkchild moniker: “I was looking for a name to reflect my music, which had a lot of minor chords — a dark sound,” he told BMI. “And because people called me a kid, I thought of combining the two.”

His youth translated to a kind of effortless invention. “He knows what people want to listen to right now,” Danyel Smith, then editor-in-chief of VIBE, said in 1999. “He doesn’t have to keep in touch: He is the average listener. He knows what kids like because he is a kid.”

“I Can Love You,” by Mary J. Blige and Lil’ Kim, was Jerkins’ biggest pre-“Boy” break, combining a New York-ready hip-hop beat with lush, romantic strings and an addictive chorus. It was likely one of the songs that Atlantic A&R Paris Davis played for Brandy in 1997 when trying to convince her to work with Jerkins instead of the producer she really wanted, Missy Elliott. Elliott and Timbaland were staunchly on the Aaliyah side of the teen-R&B-queen wars, while Dallas Austin was tied to Monica — each singer, it seems, had to choose her producer-fighter. Brandy picked Jerkins to work with on her sophomore album, which had been long delayed partly because of her successful sitcom Moesha. 

In partnering with Brandy, Jerkins was tasked not only with the obvious — making hits — but also with creating the backdrop for the singer to become an adult. Brandy, whose first single had reached the Top 10 of the Hot 100 when she was just 15, would turn 19 just before “Boy” was sent to radio. “I looked at all my old songs like ‘Baby’ and ‘I Wanna Be Down,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I was so corny,’” she said in 1998. “Not that it was a bad thing, but now I want to talk about more than that, and go to another level.”

The young producer recruited his personal stable of go-to assistants — his older brother Fred, singer-songwriter Japhe Tejeda and the late LaShawn Daniels — to help him craft one moody, adult R&B song with Brandy, and then another, and another. The album’s overall conceit was rooted in a book of clichés they found in the studio, which they used as inspiration for a number of song titles (including, of course, the title track). Ultimately, he was behind 10 of Never Say Never’s 16 songs, enough to earn him an executive-producer credit on the release and to shape one of the era’s classic albums in his own eclectic image. 

Jerkins’ innovations on Never Say Never push both forward and backward. In resisting the trend toward sampling, he insisted he was paying homage to his forebears. “I don’t use samples,” he told the Miami Times. “I play piano and I like a lot of strings. A lot of street producers are just making beats with bass lines. I’m trying to bring it back like it was in the ’70s with Barry White and Gamble and Huff, when they were making great rhythm tracks, but also had great chords and melodies.” 

Yet his spare, arpeggiated riffs and slap-bass-inflected grooves are never particularly nostalgic. The only song on the release that Jerkins has the sole production credit on, “Angel in Disguise,” shows just how confrontationally odd and artfully messy his productions could be. Listening to the glitchy, asymmetrical beat, which evokes a 2010s alt-R&B club mix, one wonders if it bears any resemblance to the original instrumental Jerkins made for Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name” — the one that prompted Beyoncé to say, “There was just too much stuff going on in it. It just sounded like this … jungle.” It does come across as the soundtrack to some journey through a chaotic unknown, though in the most listenable way imaginable.

Another new aspect of Jerkins’ productions was the gradual integration of a tag: He would have the artists recording with him say his Darkchild moniker at the beginning of each song. This trademark, a way for producers to lay claim to their beats rather than languishing in the background, was already somewhat established in hip-hop. But by using it in R&B, Jerkins further tied his own music to that genre. He also forced listeners to acknowledge him in much the same way that Timbaland and Pharrell did by rapping on some of their songs. 

Jerkins’ most memorable tag was undoubtedly on “Say My Name,” but his use of the motif goes back to “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright,” his only song on Aaliyah’s 1996 album One in a Million. “Hey yo, Rodney, you ready?” Aaliyah says, before she starts singing. On Never Say Never’s second single, “Top of the World,” guest rapper Mase shouts Jerkins out as Darkchild — likely the earliest instance of the moniker on record.

“The Boy Is Mine,” though, arrived first, and biggest. The beat is almost entirely Jerkins: Having created the gurgling bass/drum backbeat on his aforementioned MPC, he went upstairs to his parents’ living room keyboard, which had a harp setting — the source of the song’s unmistakable opening riff. 

Brandy originally recorded her part of the track alone, but then had the idea that the song would work better as a duet. At that point, she recruited Monica to serve as her foil. The fellow R&B prodigy had yet to chart outside of the Hot 100’s Top 10 and boasted a meatier, gospel-trained sound. Because they were so similar in age, aesthetic and success, the pair were often pitted against each other — creating a rivalry that they repeatedly insisted was an invention of the media in spite of a fair amount of evidence to the contrary. Their initial attempt to cut the song together was deemed a failure: “I had toned it down a notch because I have a really strong voice,” as Monica put it in the Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits. “Brandy and I agreed, ‘Do it your way and I’ll do it my way and we’ll blend them.’” So the singers recorded their “The Boy Is Mine” tracks across the country from one another, each with her respective producer (Monica with Austin, Brandy with Jerkins), which didn’t do much to quell the rumors. 

After endless rounds of tweaks befitting one of the biggest singles of the decade, the track started Jerkins’ hot streak off with an auspicious bang. He would follow it with five more top-five songs on the Hot 100 as well as a Grammy win and eight additional nominations over the next three years, living his “On the edge of tomorrow today” promise. “When you have a record like that that’s so big, you might wanna go take a trip somewhere, you might wanna go splurge, whatever it is,” he explained in 2020. “And my mindset was like, ‘Nah, we here now. They know who we are, now we gotta put our foot down and change radio. And change the sound of radio.’ And that was the mission.”