The Teddy Riley vs. Babyface VERZUZ Recap

It finally went down on Monday night (April 20th) as half a million Instagram users tuned in to witness a battle of classic R&B and hip hop hits from two icons.

After Saturday's battle was widely panned and clowned, Monday night's makeup was a great look back at the countless hits in the catalog of Teddy Riley and Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds as the two legends traded hits and stories over 2 hours on IG Live.

Now for starters its already tough to pick just 20 songs from these musical geniuses as their number of hits are in the hundreds so it was going to be interesting how things would pan out in this format.

After a few minutes of the typical "Old head, get this internet stuff together" issues, Riley kicked things off with the classic jam "Right Here" from SWV which set the tone for Face as he responded with Toni Braxton's "Love Shoulda Brought You Home".

From there it was like a virtual "My Kiss 1031 Playlist" because they ran through a ton of CLASSIC HITS from Guy, Tevin Campbell, Bobby Brown, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson and other huge names in R&B and hip hop while sharing backstories about how the songs came to be.

While Babyface couldn't match Riley's "hip hop" and "club banger" hits, he made up for that with classic SING-A-LONG R&B songs and even at one point pulled out an acoustic guitar and performed his hit "When Can I See You Again" as Riley claimed that Face wasn't playing "fair".

Face then took advantage by leading off with R&B slow jams which isn't really Riley's strong suit and at one point, Riley played the "remix" to Janet Jackson's "I Get So Lonely" featuring Blackstreet which was ACTUALLY produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, to which Face replied shadily, "I don't do remixes".

As we approached the end of hour 2, Face seemingly was starting to pull away before Riley went back to his club bangers with "Rump Shaker" before once again "technical issues" tripped up Riley knocking him offline.

While Face tried to his best to entertain the remaining audience with more 2 more hits including a heart felt finale, of Whitney Houston and Cece Winans "Count On Me" as he shared that he overcame COVID-19, Riley wrapped with "Dangerous" by Michael Jackson and "No Diggity" by Blackstreet.

While the debate will rage on, one thing is for sure, WE won witnessing these two musical icons entertaining us and sharing their craft with us during this strange time.