After collapsing and being hospitalized in 2019 due to his party-animal lifestyle, Bronx rapper French Montana had a choice to make. After spending, in his estimation, nearly “20 years without a break,” the Coke Boys frontman had to give up doing drugs and drinking if he wanted to see another 20-year run of success in hip-hop. So, as he tells XXL in a cover story published Monday, he cut out his vices and is now a year sober.
“I had a little health scare,” he says, downplaying the situation tremendously considering the situation he describes. He attributes his burnout to “a combination of a lot of things: being fatigued, dehydrated, you know, losing myself chasing money, chasing the wrong things… Too much drinking, too many pills, you know, boom.”
He says he stepped back from social media, music, and partying to focus on getting healthy and avoiding a relapse. “That’s why I took a break. I said, ‘Look, as I hard I was going on my grind, I’m ’bout to go on myself.’ And put everybody I was putting in the front on the back burner and put myself in that seat… This is how I changed it. Stepped back, took two steps back, didn’t drop no music, detox from social media… everybody is drugged up… Everything got control of my life but me.”
“So that was the day, it was November 21 last year. And since that day, I never had a drink. I just made a year.”
Among the changes French made over the course of the past year was squashing his rivalry with Harlem rapper Jim Jones. The two just released the video for their first collaboration, “Too Late.”