Monica says 'feud' with Brandy was just 'brilliant marketing'

This article originally appeared on PEOPLE.COM.

Was the boy Brandy’s or Monica’s? Turns out, nobody’s — because there was no boy!

Monica, 35, set the record straight about her reported feud in the ’90s with fellow singer Brandy, 36, sparked by their 1998 single “The Boy Is Mine.”

“People are still asking: ‘Who was the boy?’ and ‘Who got the boy?’ There was no boy! It just was a song!” Monica recently told HuffPost Live. “We played up the dramatics of it all, but I’m like, ‘Guys, we were 16 and 17.’ We’re 35 and 36 now. There was no boy and no beef.”

Per the singer — who re-teamed with Brandy in 2012 for “It All Belongs To Me” — the storied drama was all just part of promoting the song, at least at first.

“It started off as brilliant marketing, and what started to happen was people started creating these skits, and then our fans divided, and it became this really real thing,” Monica added.

And while she said some of their fans are still divided to this day, there’s no bad blood between the R&B divas.

“I am a huge supporter of everybody that’s in the business, especially her because it was for a long time only myself, her and Aaliyah, and we all were so different,” she said.

“There’s a lot of stuff that we’ll always share common ground about because we experienced so much of the same things starting so young. Very heavy things. So if there’s anybody that I wish the absolute best for it’s definitely her because I know what that journey is like and that life is like.”