Key Takeaways
- Montell Jordan said Madonna refused his handshake and twice asked, “Don’t I own you?” when they met at a Grammys event in the mid-1990s.
- Jordan viewed the remark as a “power thing” rather than a racial one, linking it to Maverick’s interest in his co-writer’s share of “This Is How We Do It.”
- He revisited the awkward encounter while promoting Shilo and the Not-So-Scary Girl Above His Bed, the children’s book he created with his wife, Kristin.
Montell Jordan has revealed what happened after Madonna greeted him with the eyebrow-raising question, “Don’t I own you?”
Speaking with Clay Cane on SiriusXM, Jordan said the pop icon refused his handshake and repeated the remark when he failed to understand her—a detail he had not included when he first told the story publicly last year.
Jordan was still a newcomer when the two crossed paths at a Grammys event in the mid-1990s. Surrounded by established music heavyweights, he was simply excited to be invited into the room. “When I come up to shake her hand, she didn’t shake my hand,” he recalled. “She just looked at me, and kind of said, ‘Don’t I own you?’ And I said, ‘Huh?’ And she said, ‘Don’t I own you?’”
Jordan, stunned by both the comment and the person delivering it, walked away. “It was just like a weird, awkward moment of, ‘Okay, I don’t know what to do with that,’” he said. “We were just like, ‘Okay, so she’s not going to shake hands or whatever.’”
He added that he tried to rationalize the snub at the time: “That’s Madonna, you know. Super awkwardly walk—she don’t, maybe she don’t shake hands or whatever.”
Jordan said Madonna’s question was rooted in the business behind his 1995 breakthrough, “This Is How We Do It.” Her company, Maverick, attempted to secure a publishing agreement involving Jordan’s share of the record, but he declined. His co-writer, the late Oji Pierce, made a deal with Maverick, leaving the company with an interest in Pierce’s share.
The connection came with an added twist: Jordan’s single replaced Madonna’s “Take a Bow” at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Cane also asked whether Madonna, a powerful white artist, asking a young Black performer if she owned him felt racial. Jordan said the words carry a different weight now than they did to him in 1996.
“It didn’t feel like a racial thing,” he explained. “It felt like a caste-system type of thing—more of a power thing than racial.”
He described her delivery as “sarcastically being funny, but not funny” and said the two have neither met again nor discussed the exchange since.
The renewed conversation arrives as Jordan opens a markedly different chapter in his career. He and his wife, Kristin Jordan, released Shilo and the Not-So-Scary Girl Above His Bed on September 1.
Inspired by a childhood conversation with their son, the picture book reverses the traditional monster-under-the-bed story, following a young monster who fears the human girl sleeping above him.
