QTheQuestion.com

Author: Maurice Williams

The other day I got a chance of a lifetime to interview one of the sexiest, smartest, and most cunning personalities within the urban industry. Though you’ve probably seen Melyssa Ford in numerous music videos ranging from Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin” to Sisqo’s “Thong Song” chances are you probably didn’t realize exactly how extensive the Canada based super model’s resume really is. She’s hosted BET’s In Style, appeared in a number of movies, and graced the covers of magazine such as Black Men, FHM, and Maxim among others.

After more than a decade in the spotlight Melyssa Ford is sticking to her guns in excelling to new heights in the entertainment industry. In the midst of a hectic and physically draining schedule Melyssa took a little time out to let us in on what she’s been up to, how she really feels about the music industry, and what she thinks is wrong with video models these days.

So how are you doing today?

Honestly I’m tired (laughs) it’s been a very very long and aggressive schedule on this Lady Hennessey tour but um it’s great so I’m just a little exhausted from the transcontinental travel.

So what are some of the things that you are currently working on?

Well the Lady Hennessey tour takes up a significant amount of my time there are four other young ladies that are involved in the Lady Hennessey tour, but I’m the face of the tour. Basically what that means is a lot more work for me where they might do one or two appearances per week, I do a minimum of four days in a market, which is a lot. So I’ve been everywhere, all over Ohio, all over New Jersey, all over New York, DC, now I’m in Philly, Boston, Chicago and this is just phase one. Second phase is going to be the southwest region, which is going to be all over Texas, Arizona, and California.

So you’re on your own little campaign trail. Sort of!

Basically, I feel like a politician…

I imagine!

I do, I do. I shake hands; I kiss babies all day long. I smile and represent the brand of Hennessey as best a I possibly can and so honestly that is what takes up a lot of my time. Since I spend a lot of time alone in hotel rooms or on airplanes I’ve got a lot of time to write so I’m in the process of writing a screenplay and obviously trying to write a book. I’m also in the developmental phase of a play being created by an award winning Broadway director on my life in the industry.

I was going to ask you about the book that you have coming out. What would you say is your main motivation for writing a book and what is it about?

There’s several reasons why I’m motivated to write a book, number one being it’s an organic talent of mine. I’ve been writing since I could read and basically walk. I was a minor in University English Literature, my major was Forensic Psychology. So when you’re an organic artist its like you have no choice in the matter, you just write and write and write, but also I firmly believe that the fact that I’m as educated and as well read as I am is why I’m still relevant in this business ten years later. Where as I can count hundred of girls who participated in doing music videos and ended up within the same pages of the magazines I was once on the covers of, why no one even knows their names anymore.

My intellect is what has kept me afloat, beauty fades or your popularity goes through peaks and valleys and stuff like that, but my level of intelligence is what has always been what kind of kept me afloat. I always want to encourage that to the younger generation; don’t be overwhelmed by the perceived glamour of this business, please do yourself a favor and focus on your studies. Have a plan B, C, or D, and just be a well-rounded individual and have more than just one interest.

And the other thing that falls in line with that is I have a lot of knowledge in the business being kind of the icon and pioneer that I’m perceived to be. I feel like I want to share with young people who either want to break into the business or are really, really, curious about it. I really take the glitter off of it and show you point blank what it is and a lot of the sacrifices and the difficulties that I had to go through and experience forging a career through a male dominated industry which equals a lot of sexism, a lot of chauvanism, and also just the sacrifice of my personal life.

What types of things would you say you’ve had to sacrifice in your personal life for the business?

The number one thing that I would say gets sacrificed is your sense of any entitlement to privacy. Once you become visible you are public property. People kind of have this idea of “you got in the business, you asked for it…” I didn’t really ask you to try to film me while I’m sitting on a toilet trying to pee in a public bathroom, I don’t think that’s what I asked for when I started to appear on the cover of magazines, in music videos, on BET, and in movies and whatever. I think that the concept of fame has really become very combuluted and it’s all twisted up. Fame used to be a by-product of success, whereas now it is the sole achievement and people allow themselves to become very corrupted. So trying to hold on to some kind of a moral code or system of values in this business can be very challenging especially if you’re young and you’re attractive and you want to succeed.

So the sacrifice of my privacy, having to deal with lies that people tell about you, also trying to be in a normal relationship with somebody. People ask me why you don’t date Joe Shmoe the regular guy. I actually do! I actually have. I in no way shape or form discriminate a man based on his status, his power, his position, or what he does. It’s just the individual. There’s certain things that come along with dating the regular guy where he’s not gonna know how to deal with it. And you can only understand what that’s like when once you’ve been in the position to have to deal with something. Whether he’s in the industry or if he’s in no way shape or form related to it, I experience a lot of difficulty in my personal relationship with guys.

So these are some of the things that you have to sacrifice. You also have to keep in mind that yourself are kind of like real estate. You have to put a value on who you think you are in this business. People will always try to short change you and you have to stick to your guns and what that means is that you have to choose your projects wisely otherwise you look like you’ll attend the opening of an envelope and do anything for anybody and you’re seen as kind desperate, you have to choose things wisely and sometimes its very big payouts.

I’ll give you a very good example, at one point I was asked to endorse a sex product and they wanted to pay me 150 thousand dollars just for the use of my image and me saying I love to use this particular sexual toy. I wouldn’t do i,t because the slippery slope to where that could lead to could completely dismantle all of the hard work that I had done to get people to respect me and respect my mind, just that one thing. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money. But then again in the long run when you can sacrifice everything like big projects will go away people won’t look at you for anything else, that hundred and fifty thousand dollars does not last long. So those are some of the sacrifices, the sacrifice of some big paychecks for something that will probably hurt your career in the long run, but the short-term money is great. Those are some of the choices you have to make in this business.

Speaking of lies or what not, you weren’t in The Game’s video for “Wouldn’t Get Far” so what did you think of his statements when you first heard them?

It’s a very funny story. One day DJ Clue calls me up who is like my homie, we work out together at Chelsea Pears when I was living there in New York, I live in LA currently. He calls me up and he’s like “yo Melyssa did you diss the Game,” because I’m famous for dissing… well not dissing, but just not being remotely interested in shitting where I eat which is the industry. So I was like no…. and he was like “are you sure?” I briefly met him once when I was doing an interview with G-Unit years ago. Like why are you asking he’s “like because he put your name in a song” and I’m like ok I’m assuming its not that good and he’s like eeemmmmm… I was like well is it on a mixtape or is an album cut. He was like “its on the album” I was like oh shit is it a filler or is it gonna be a single? He’s like “its gonna be a single,” so Clue reads what is says and I fell out laughing my ass off, because it was funny to me, because its wordplay.

If you listen to what it says it rhymes. Melyssa Ford drives a Honda Accord, will do anything to get to the Grammy Awards. Like the fact that people took this so fucking seriously ran with it and still finds the humor in it or really took it seriously just boggles my mind at how many mental midgets there are out there just fuckin freaks me out that people cannot think for themselves. Like duh it’s a song for Christ sake. I guess the issue with the song is that he mentioned other females in the song that do have that kind of reputation so it lent validity to what he said about me which sucked so I ended up in a bad position. Game actually apologized to me in front of a huge crowd of people and said that he meant no harm by it and I was like what’s done is done like whatever and life goes on and its not that serious, but trust me people still ask me about that and I’m like oh my God its not that big of a deal.

I imagine, you know I did the research and it seems like compared to all the other video models, which I don’t want to categorize yourself as just that, but it seems like compared to most other video models you’re a lot more well rounded than everyone else is. I mean you hold a degree and ….

The reason for that is because the girls that are in music videos now, this was a goal of their’s, this is what they strived for, I want to be that, I want to be in a video with Fabolous. I just wanna be in a fuckin music video! That’s their goal, when I started doing music videos it was secondary income, I was a University student, I wanted extra money plus I got to travel. I literally would go home and resume my life as a University student and as a bar tender on weekends and I worked for a satellite TV company in Toronto. I never even watched my videos on TV. I never watched TV, I was too busy with school. All my friends at the call center would be like “Oh my God Melyssa we saw your video” and I was like really, Ok. I was never impressed with me, you know I could care less. The money was more important to me.

I got into videos at a time when the music industry was booming. There were 600,000 dollar, milliom dollar, two million dollar budgets for music videos. There was a lot of money flying around. Lets go to Trinidad, rent a million dollar yacht, and do “Big Pimpin…” Ok… sure lets do that, and that’s what we did and it was great! There is no way these girls are seeing what I saw and what my generation of music video models saw. I liked the girls who did music videos around the time that I did them. We’re like the supermodels of the 90’s. Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks, Stephanie Seymour, Linda Evangelista, we’re the glamour ones.

Everyone who came after us were cheated out of the experience, because the record industry changed and the money was not available for these astronomical budgets anymore and the landscape of videos changed and women were becoming a lot more objectified. That’s was the point of which I started to have a lot of discomfort with doing music videos coupled with the fact that it just wasn’t my lane anymore.

You’ve got to grow within the industry that you exist. You’ve got to expand your horizons and prove that you have talent doing more than just one thing. So the girls now don’t really see the reason to do anything other than what they’re striving to do which is to be in a music video. So I find that academics are not high on their list of priorities. Which is unfortunate because that was always what took precedence over doing a music video. I was asked to do Nas and Mobb Deep in the south Pacific and I had to turn it down, because my school schedule did not permit me to go. I could have gone and said fuck school. But you have to exercise some form of discipline as an individual you can’t be instructed what to do 24/7 everyday of your life. You’re an adult and you have to make adult decisions and my adult decisions were to be responsible to me.

What would you say is your most cherished accomplishment of your career thus far?

My first solo calendar was an achievement for me, because I had been doing the covers of magazine for a minute and I was really more interested in being involved in the creative process. Often times when you end up on a shoot for a magazine the art director or the creative director has already preplanned the wardrobe, the setting, the locations been scouted, the photographer has already been chosen, they already know how they want to shoot you. The only thing that you can do is show up and pose. I wasn’t comfortable just being that.

My first calendar was born from a concept of being every man’s fantasy and I believed that I could be that because I could be such a chameleon. The minute I change my hair or makeup I look like a different girl. I just wanted to give twelve different versions of Melyssa Ford and I feel like I accomplished that with my first calendar.

It was really really a beautiful calendar the way that it was put together the creative design. So that was an achievement of mine, because all of the ideas belonged to me and from that spawned two other calendars, but what also came about was every other girl realized, “hey I don’t have to pose for anyone else’s calendar, I can do my own.” Nobody was doing that, that’s also like the achievement; the fact that I was the first to do a lot of the things that girls do now. With the ring-tone deals, the wall paper on your phone, the solo calendars, the behind the scene DVDs, all of that stuff can really honestly be attributed to me, so that’s a sense of achievement as well; the iconic status that’s been placed upon my shoulders.

Well that’s about all the questions I have for you tonight. Melyssa, I really appreciate the honest and integrity based answers and that’s really about it on my end.

If you guys need anything else you can hit up my publicist and we can go from there.

Again, thanks a lot Melyssa!

You’re welcome Maurice.

Filed under: Interviews