“I'm not going to rap no more,” Mase tells Funkmaster Flex exactly ten years ago today. “I'm doing what God wants me to do.”
And with those words during an April 20 interview on New York’s Hot 97 [WQHT-FM], former Bad Boy affiliate Mason Betha shocks the rap world with his announcement that he was turning his back on music to pursue a higher calling. The news comes less than two months before the June 15 release of his sophomore album Double Up (Bad Boy), the follow-up to his 1997 quadruple platinum debut Harlem World.
When asked about how his mentor Bad Boy Entertainment founder Sean Combs would react to the bombshell, the baby faced lyricist—who months later received a license to become a minister to preach at his own Atlanta-based church, Saving A Nation Endangered (now called Mason Betha Ministries) —said, “P. Diddy is going to do his thing and I wish him well." And Pastor Mason Betha’s move to the pulpit seemed legit. He even traveled to such cities as Dallas, Detroit, Tennessee, New Orleans and Los Angeles to spread the word for his The Hell Is Not Full Crusade.
But by 2004, Mase came out of retirement to release the clean-cut Bad Boy album Welcome Back. While the album reached respectable sales of half a million copies, Welcome Back failed to capture the imagination of fans used to the slick talking, ladies man lyricism of yesteryear—setting the stage for the brief, puzzling return of Murder Mase on G Unit. But that’s another story.
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