Montell Jordan didn’t enjoy sex symbol status

R&B star Montell Jordan was never comfortable with his sex symbol status at the height of his career.
The singer burst onto the scene back in 1995 with his classic debut single This Is How We Do It, which served as the first R&B release for Def Jam Recordings.
Label executives were determined to have Montell play up his sultry sex appeal by asking him to pose on red carpets and in photoshoots without smiling, but he admits that was never really his style.
“It was just tough, because if you see my personality, I’m a smiley guy, and literally, to be on a all hip-hop label (sic) at the time, it would mess up the street credibility of the label if they had this nice, charming, smiley guy, so it was like, ‘Don’t smile, wear your (sun)glasses,'” he told news show Access Live.
“Everything was more (subdued)… That was the journey.”
He also struggled to juggle the pressures of his newfound fame as a newlywed, after tying the knot with Kristin Hudson just as his star was rising.
“We got married in ’94, and literally, we went on our honeymoon, we came back, and dove into the world of the music biz (sic),” he said. “Probably, three months after that (honeymoon), we were releasing records and starting to travel all over the world. It was tough because we jumped into marriage and then right after that we jumped into the music biz, so we kinda did both things at the same time.”
Luckily, Montell was able to find a balance between his work and home life, but in 2010, he decided to turn his back on singing to become a pastor, pursuing a dream he’d had as a child.
“From the time I was a kid, I knew that I was called into ministry,” he explained. “I was brought up as a church musician, I was always around it (church), it was always something that was in me. The way I like to say it, I was in church, but church wasn’t in me, so that was the journey that I took.”
Montell has since returned to his singing roots, and he insists his time away from the industry helped him put his profession in perspective.
“I just had to learn that music didn’t define who I was, I define what music was, and so I had to step away from it for a while to understand that music doesn’t make me, I make music,” he said.