FRENCH MONTANA RETURNS TO HIS HOME COUNTRY FOR A HISTORIC SHOW
The star, who recently played in front of 50,000 people, chats to Saeed Saeed about fame, home and the rap industry
French Montana’s success is a hip-hop fairy tale. It is a story of a wideeyed kid from a poor family in Morocco who emigrates to the United States of America as a teenager. He later becomes one of the biggest names in the music industry.
With millions of albums sold and friends like P Diddy and DJ Khaled on speed dial, French Montana returned to his home city last week for a concert attended by more than 50,000 people and members of the Moroccan royal family.
Meeting the press a few days later, the 33-year-old Montana – real name Karim Kharbouch – says he is still coming to terms with the enormity of the Mawazine Festival gig.
“It does feel like a success story, not just because of the royal family being there, but to be back with my people. It’s a special kind of feeling that I really can’t describe,” he says. “I remembered being on stage and seeing all these young people dancing along and having fun, and it makes me think about the time when I was that age and back here. It’s a beautiful thing, man,” he says.
Indeed, Montana’s trips to Morocco are always steeped in nostalgia. On a previous trip, he holidayed in the blue city of Chefchaouen – where his family formerly lived. His 2012 trip back to Rabat was an especially poignant affair because he was reconciled with his estranged father.
The rugged lifestyle of the past may be far from the finely manicured Los Angeles mansion where the rapper now resides – snapped up for a cool US$3.3 million (Dh12.1m) in 2016 from none other than fellow popstar Selena Gomez – but Montana’s ties to his origins are strong.
In addition to personally funding a school in Rabat, Montana’s latest video for the track Famous was also shot amid the mystical splendour of Chefchaouen. That musical hometown salute was an apt way to conclude the
promotion of last year’s hit album Jungle Rules, as the seeds of the record were also laid in the continent.
After creating an undeniable industry buzz through no fewer than 13 mixtapes, Montana’s work ethic was praised by hip-hop mogul P Diddy, who signed him up to his label, Bad Boy Records.
After the moderate success of his 2013 debut album
Excuse My French, Montana was set to release his follow-up album MC4 in December 2016 only for it to be heavily bootlegged after the American department store Target mistakenly placed it on shelves two months before its official release.
Dejected by the result, Montana shrugged off the disappointment by heading back to the studio. When he released the stand-alone single Unforgettable, it was initially meant to act as a stop-gap measure.
However, the almost instant reaction it received from fans forced Montana to take it back to the studio for a further polish. He accompanied the track with a soulful and self-directed video shot in Uganda featuring the country’s celebrated children’s dance crew The Triplett Ghetto Kids. With over 700 million views, Montana credits the song’s success for inspiring him to record Jungle Rules, which remains his biggest success yet.
But Montana’s road to hiphop success was in no way smooth and involved its fair share of physical altercations and a near heart-stopping stay in a hospital emergency room.
Montana experienced the latter when he miraculously survived a gunshot to the head after he was ambushed outside a New York studio in 2003. The subsequent investigation revealed that an associate of Montana was responsible for setting him up for the hit.
The artist says that the cutthroat nature of the present hip-hop scene, not to mention the jealousy that comes with celebrity status, serves as the daily reminder of that neardeath experience 15 years ago.
He points to the recent killing of troubled rapper XXXTentacion as a case in point. “When it comes to rap, I just feel like it is a dangerous game because you are dealing with a lot of people who just want to be in your place and they don’t know how to deal with that because that blessing is not meant for them,” he says.
“And sometimes, it can go as far as someone taking your life and that happens to a lot of young and old artists and anyone who is in a successful place in hip-hop. So you always gotta pray to Allah and hope that you remain blessed,” Montana says.
The artist cites the wisdom learnt from the struggles for keeping him steady on his feet. “I won’t change anything that happened to me because it did make me the man that I am today,” he says.
“Whether it is being an immigrant or seeing my family struggle or going through certain things in my life, I just feel like I am blessed, man. I am just grateful.”