“Puff is not a rapper,” French says, explaining the two’s respective strengths. “He’s gonna make sure he take you from one to a million — because he knows how to market — he does everything else [besides rapping]. And Ross is the best rapper right now, hands down. Or top three. Both of them played different parts in my career.”
Loyalty is important to Montana, but after 10 years of grinding, he’s come to understand that it is precious in the music industry because of its rarity. “The biggest lesson I’ve learned about this industry is that it’s a big fake, made-up world,” he says. “When you’re not hot, nobody’s gonna be there. People stop picking up the phone. As long as you can stay hot, you can get whatever you want.”
And being hot can lead to unforeseen changes in people that you never wanted to change.
“They say money changes people. In my circumstances I feel like money didn’t change me, it changed people around me,” Montana claims. “People start expecting you to act a certain way.”
Another facet of the game — especially for a rising hip-hop star — is tabloid gossip. Montana has had to endure rumors — the most notable of which involves Miami rapstress Trina. The two have been linked for months, but Montana dismisses any chatter about who he’s dating. “I just feel like people only know what they see in blogs and pictures and this and that,” he proclaims. “Look, I’m a young, fly rapper from New York. Every R&B chick or rap chick gonna try to show me some love. That’s what it is. Once you start stunting and doing all this, it becomes all ‘He said, she said.’ I don’t worry about none of that. I let them worry about it. Because they worry about it more than me. I’m chillin’.”
Not that being “a young, fly rapper from New York” hasn’t caused Montana his fair share of worries. He and Deen Kharbouch married in 2007 and the couple has a young son. But things came apart after five years, with Kharbouch claiming that Montana’s womanizing was the main culprit. The two divorced in 2012.
“Things work different for different people,” Montana says of that time in his life. “At first, I wasn’t moving how I’m moving [now]. But when it hit and I started going away for two or three months, it just got to be too much.”
