Mase floats skyward wearing golden goggles and a shiny suit that looks like a tricked-out air traffic control vest. His rise through an ultramodern wind tunnel feels remarkably symbolic as Kelly Price lip-syncs Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out” on a monitor behind him. He’s wearing the same diamond-studded Jesus piece the Notorious B.I.G. had on when he was murdered. As he swaggers through the futuristic Hype Williams-directed music video for 1997’s “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” histories are being rewritten in real-time; the nature of rap as an epic retail commodity is growing. It is a eulogy and a coronation all at once. It is Bad Boy rising from the ashes.
This was how Sean “Puffy” Combs, marketing extraordinaire, formally introduced a rebranded Mason Betha to the world. Despite guest starring on a No. 1 single months prior, this was Mase’s coming out party, the official induction of Bad Boy’s next star. For several years, Betha had been a foot soldier on the insular Harlem rap scene snarling about returning fire in shootouts, infrared beams, and slug-filled foes coughing up blood. Now he was nearly nonchalant, rapping about Dolce tube socks and putting his name on blimps. The transformation into a flashy ladykiller was Puff’s idea. “I was Murda, P. Diddy made me pretty,” Mase joked on a song called “Lookin’ at Me.”
The transformation worked brilliantly and made Mase and Puff arguably more popular than any rappers before them, but it also raised questions about the value of style over substance among a classicist rap community that had just lost two icons to gun violence, the first Tupac Shakur, the other in their own camp. Puff, the man who’d brought hip-hop Biggie Smalls, one of its greatest ever rappers, was suddenly being pegged as an arbiter of bad taste, with Mase his steward in flamboyant emptiness. Initially seen as a sycophant riding Puff’s coattails, and then as an unworthy successor to Biggie, Mase was nearly defiant in his self-belief: “You don’t like me? Bet against me,” he rapped casually on “Niggaz Wanna Act.” That effortless confidence and poise defines his debut album, Harlem World, one of the best rap albums to be almost shamelessly commercial. It was the peak of the shiny suit era, sparking the short-lived jiggy rap phenomenon of the late ’90s.
Mason Bethea was a New Yorker born in the South. Perhaps that’s why he seemed to do everything on his own time, why he talked slower than the big city rappers he grew up with. The youngest of six children, he was delivered almost two months early in Jacksonville, Florida, and he and his mother fled an abusive father, showing up unannounced to live with an uncle in Harlem. Unscheduled arrivals became a hallmark of his life. “I guess from the very beginning I was coming onto the scene before people were ready to see me,” he says in his 2001 pseudo memoir, Revelations: There’s a Light After the Lime. After leading the basketball team to the PSAL Finals his senior year at Manhattan Center High School, Betha and teammate Cameron Giles had dreams of going to the NBA, but when Betha was forced to repeat his senior year—which meant a year without playing ball—the friends picked up rap as a hobby. From the beginning, they were opposites. Cam was the fire; Mase was preternaturally chill.
As amateur rappers in Harlem going by Killa Cam and Murda Mase, the two immersed themselves in the corner scene, rapping around town at gambling spots and after games at Rucker Park. They joined a rap crew called Children of the Corn, founded in 1993 by a far more serious Harlem rapper named Big L. They were managed by an assertive Manhattan Center student named Damon Dash, but he was really courting L, who was known around town as the best rapper in the borough. (Some years later, Dame’s Roc-A-Fella Records would chase Big L again until his death in 1999.) The crew was primarily rapping about being young and menacing with Mase playing the coolest head. Cam was all action (“I’m a cat with nine lives but every day I risk em.”) Big L was the first in the group to catch a break when his Lifestylez ov da Poor and Dangerous single “M.V.P.” started gaining traction in New York. But a few months later, the Notorious B.I.G. released a “One More Chance” remix with the same DeBarge sample and all but killed L’s momentum. As Big L’s major career sputtered, Murda Mase kept rapping on 139th and Lenox, in front of a 24-hour chicken spot. It was a connection to Biggie that would soon give him his chance to become Harlem’s biggest star.
Betha’s twin sister introduced him to Cudda Love, Biggie’s road manager, in 1996. After hearing a Murda Mase tape, Cudda went up to SUNY Purchase, where Betha was going to school, to inquire about his level of commitment to rap. “‘I already know you’re nice,’” Mase remembers him saying, “‘I just need to know if you want to make money?’” The relationship started paying dividends almost immediately. After only a few weeks, Cudda took Betha to audition for Biggie on a freezing New York City sidewalk out front of the Apollo theater. Biggie was impressed and wanted to put Murda Mase in the newly debuted Brooklyn group Junior M.A.F.I.A., but Cudda had other ideas: he sold his Acura to buy a pair of plane tickets to Atlanta for the colossal annual rap convention, Jack the Rapper’s Family Affair. Mase was so broke at the time that he was sharing a one-bedroom apartment and splitting White Castle burgers, but Cudda, knowing the man needed to look the part, let Mase borrow a silk Versace shirt with flamboyant colors, and Mase spent his last dime on Versace pants and shoes to complete the look. “Somebody’s going to notice me,” he remembers thinking.
The convention afterparty was at the Hard Rock, and when he failed to woo producer Jermaine Dupri outside the venue, Cudda finagled an opportunity for Betha to try and impress Puff on the dancefloor. “You rap like that all the time? That slow?” Mase remembers Puff asking him, intrigued. “I liked his style,” Combs told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “His personality stood out. The sound of his voice. He sounded like me.” When Mase got back to New York, he was Bad Boy. Only a few weeks later, he was reunited with Biggie, this time as teammates, on the “Only You” remix. There was a dollar sign in his name now. Puff showed him the money (allegedly $250,000, $50k upfront, outbidding Heavy D at Uptown Records, Tommy Boy Records, and his old friend Dame Dash at Roc-A-Fella) and he planned to make good on his investment. “I’m the newest member of the Bad Boy team/And I’ma bring this nigga Puff mad more cream,” Mase pledged on “Take What’s Yours.” “With hooks galore, leave the city shook for sure/And I’ma take ‘em back where Biggie took ‘em before.”
Mase quickly made good on his promise. Puff was anxious to put his talents to use across the Bad Boy roster, and basically every record they cut together from 1996 to the summer of ‘97 hit. In the wake of Biggie’s death in March of 1997, Mase was suddenly thrust into a new role as replacement headliner. He was constantly fielding questions about inheriting the Bad Boy throne. His response was to turn that throne into a recliner. The album was wholly self-aware; chock full of jams and conscious of it. Mase wanted to take his insular Harlem world global, and he did, rolling out a red carpet from Lenox Ave. into suburban households across the country.
Harlem World is larger than life. Mase had a buttery touch when in his groove, as if having an out-of-body experience watching himself churn out hits. “Why do what most do? Do what you ’posed to/Make hot jams y’all, sell bicoastal/If you want a hit you can let me coach you/Money back on anything that got my vocals,” he rapped on rhetorical opener “Do You Wanna Get $?” And while it’s safe to say Puff Daddy wasn’t a good rapper and was, in fact, simply just an executive masquerading as a showman, no such claim could be made about Mase. His flows were as silky, or as plush, or as golden as the material world furnishing his songs. He made the realm of luxury feel quaint.
Part of the credit is owed to Puff, his ace in-house production team the Hitmen, and other rising beatmakers like the Neptunes, Dame Grease, and Jermaine Dupri who, to paraphrase Combs on the uber-jiggy “Feel So Good,” flipped hits from the ’80s and made ’em sound so crazy. They spun Isaac Hayes, Teena Marie, New Edition, Curtis Mayfield, and Michael Jackson into satiny soundbeds Mase would sprawl out in. Talk of Puff during the late ’90s often found a way back to Berry Gordy shaping the sound of Motown; the Bad Boy exec had a similar genius for putting everyone in a position to succeed. No Way Out remains his crowning achievement as a producer, but across Harlem World he makes Mase look like rap Hugh Hefner.
Mase was underrated in his ability to make extravagant things seem quotidian. He had TVs in the headrests of his red Lex years before Xzibit was kitting out cars on “Pimp My Ride.” He preferred his money in yen because the Japanese didn’t tax him, and if you had something to ask him you could send him a fax. Rappers had been rich before but they’d rarely been thriftless. Mase was Scrooge McDuck diving into a vault of coins and finding his wealth exhausting. “It’s like y’all be talkin’ funny/I don’t understand the language of people with short money,” he rapped on “Feel So Good” over a Kool & the Gang sample that sounded like strolling the Las Vegas Strip at night. To listen to his music was to be vicariously untouchable.
But Harlem World was wrongly depicted as lyrically limited and uninvolved, as well as far removed from the street rap deemed of and for the culture, emblematic of a transitional period when rap’s reach had, to the disdain of some hardcore fans, become a “Seinfeld” joke. It was too above ground, too kitsch, too expensive. The album was often ostentatious, to be sure, largely materialistic and definitely profit-oriented, but certainly not without its hood charms and never unaware of where it came from. Mase’s raps weren’t dense or heavy with double-entendre, but there was plenty of subtly tricky rapping worked into his flexible cadences. And for all the talk of excess, Mase pulled grit and grind rappers like DMX, 8Ball, and MJG into his orbit, made space for the shriek raps of Busta Rhymes, and matched the finesse of early mafioso JAY-Z. He was just as likely to shit talk as he was to flex. Everything circled back to the ubiquity he’d achieved as a Bad Boy poster child, but it still all began with Murda in Harlem.
Almost overnight, Mase set up shop on the Billboard charts as if it was a label requirement. From Biggie’s death through the summer of 1998, all Mase did was make hit records: After handing Puff No. 1 and No. 2 smash hits, “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” and “Been Around the World,” respectively, and then bringing things to a head with his zeitgeist-shifting appearance on “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” Harlem World produced three Top 10 singles of its own. The album, which hit stores in October, was double platinum by December. He collected four plaques from the RIAA and was nominated for the same Grammy twice. The only rappers who had bigger years than he did were … Biggie and Puff.
The short-lived Jiggy Rap Era—which included Jay-Z’s In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, peaked with Will Smith’s Big Willie Style, and concluded with the rise of DMX in 1998—has been primarily remembered with contempt, along with the Ringtone Rap that would take hold a decade later. But Harlem World remains the sleekest rap album about becoming super famous. It set precedents for decades of posh rap consumerism. It is flagrantly commodified, proud of it, but not lesser for it.
Somewhere along the line, Mase grew weary of the fame, which was reflected in his music. He lost his love for rap and retired live on Hot 97 weeks before the release of his 1999 sophomore album Double Up. He became a pastor. He briefly returned to give rap another go in 2004 but was never the same. The magic was gone. As Kanye put it on “Devil in a New Dress”: “Don’t leave while you’re hot, that’s how Mase screwed up.”
But Mase’s legacy lives on in every rags-to-mega-riches story that’s become standard in rap; in the flows co-opted by everyone from Drake to Pusha T; in wannabe rap moguls naming their imprint after $200,000 luxury cars; in Jesus pieces as a rite of passage. So much of what rap has become can be traced back to those shiny suits blinged out in that wind tunnel. As Mase floats, an entire genre hangs in the balance.
