Verzuz Cheat Sheet: Alicia Keys x John Legend

Even at their most competitive, the Verzuz battles designed by Swizz Beatz and Timbaland have always been about celebrating the transcendent power of music. With the 19 June matchup of John Legend and Alicia Keys, which you could stream right here on Apple Music, the popular live-streamed event elevates this focus to another level altogether. To help ring in this Juneteenth—the day we celebrate the news of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reaching the last group of unfreed slaves in the United States—Verzuz presents two of the most prominent voices of contemporary black music over the past two decades. In addition to crafting the kind of ballads that play at weddings every day the world over, both Legend and Keys have been active participants in the fight for racial equality. Their pop and R&B hits, songwriting and piano riffs may have been hard to escape since their emergence in the early 2000s, but their catalogues go way deeper than that; get the full brunt of their discographies by way of the official John Legend and Alicia Keys Cheat Sheet playlist, curated by Apple Music host Lowkey.