Back to rap

Five years after he stunned the hip-hop world by giving up a multiplatinum recording career for a religious career, Pastor Mason Betha is still talking about a resurrection — this time, a musical one.

A huge hip-hop star known to the world as Ma$e, Betha all but declared his alter ego dead when he traded in his hedonistic rap life in 1999.

He went to school, became a minister, married, got his own church and disavowed his former life, complaining that the rap world he once belonged to was corrupting the youth with sexual and violent lyrics.

Now he has returned to the hip-hop community that he only recently had held in disdain. His new album, “Welcome Back” — which debuted at No. 4 on this week’s Billboard album chart — reunites him with former mentor P. Diddy and his Bad Boy record label.

Betha has even collaborated with some of today’s more raucous rappers on their hits, though all his raps are now squeaky clean.

His sudden comeback seems as inexplicable as his now-ended retirement, an incongruous step in a life that had been steeped in the word of God.

But ask Betha if he’s veered away from God’s path, and he simply smiles and explains that it’s all part of the same plan.

“I’m already in my field. This is just another part of my entrepreneurship,” he says in his typical slow drawl, sitting in the offices of his record label, wearing a lime-green striped shirt with matching multicolored jewels draping his neck and wrist.

“I’ve got a purpose for being here this time. I’ve got a reason behind my voice now.”

In Betha’s view, he didn’t have any reason behind his voice when he gave it all up at age 20. A charismatic figure with a baby face and dimples, he had become a rap superstar with his laid-back rhymes and party lyrics that referred to sex, drugs and more sex.

He rang up some 4 million in sales with just two albums: 1997’s “Harlem World” and 1999’s “Double Up.” His voice was on hit after hit, from his own (“Feels So Good”) to the numerous verses he dropped on other people’s songs as a coveted guest (including Mariah Carey’s “Honey” and the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo Money, Mo Problems”).

But he wasn’t happy with the person he was. He describes that Ma$e as “arrogant” and a “womanizer” who lacked spiritual character.

“Here I am a young man who has seen a great amount of success, and I already have the money and the fame and all of those things, but I felt like I wanted to be rich on the inside. I didn’t like the fact that I had all of those things, but I was empty on the inside,” Betha says.

“I wanted a fulfilling life, what every person wants. And then I just made a decision to leave music to venture out and go after what it is I always wanted, and that was total life prosperity. I just didn’t want a musical side of me being prosperous but I’m dying on the inside.”

So he left New York for Atlanta, plunged into religion and tried to shed all traces of his former self. He created the nondenominational Mason Betha Ministries Inc., started his own church in suburban Atlanta and gave friends the fancy cars and jewels he had attained while a star.

He even stopped listening to rap.

According to friends, he didn’t appear to be restless to return to his previous life. Cudda “Country” Love, Ma$e’s manager, recalls the casual conversations the two would have; rap never came up.

“My mind-set was Ma$e was not never coming back; I never talked to him about music,” says Love. “The first time I talked to Ma$e since he retired, he needed a church van.”

Betha says he didn’t miss rap, although he adds: “My biggest fear was, who would I be without music? I had to prove it to myself that I could live out there, and once I proved it to myself, then I think that’s how this all came about.”

It also came about because rapper Nelly, another Love protege, had been needling Love to ask Ma$e to collaborate on a song.

“I was like, ‘Nelly wanna talk with you,’ ” Love recalls. “(Betha) was like, ‘What kind of business Nelly want with me other than Jesus?’ “

Yet Betha agreed to go to Los Angeles to listen to Nelly record some songs. The first song he heard from the St. Louis rapper — known for sometimes raunchy lyrics and videos — wasn’t appropriate for him.

“(But) the next day I came back he was playing a more clean song, a song that had some substance to it, and I was listening to the music and I was like, ‘Yo, I’m going to get on this song with you,’ and he was like, ‘Go ahead, go ahead!’ “

Soon after that, Love got a call from Betha saying he was ready to return to hip-hop — but not just for his own sake.

“I really didn’t have no reason to really come back and do music, but then when I thought about all of the people, and especially young ladies who knew a different Ma$e, I thought it would be robbery not to come back and at least allow them to see the new person that I’ve become,” he says.

The new music from Ma$e certainly shows a different side. Instead of boasting about smoking weed and scoring women, as he did with his previous albums, this time around he talks about not taking clothes off and tithing. But it still has the same club-friendly hip-hop sound.

“It’s pretty much just an extra-clean album, but if you listen to it, it don’t sound poppish; it don’t sound corny,” says Love.

Whether Betha’s congregation approves of his comeback is unclear. A reporter who tried to talk to church members about it was surrounded by church leaders and asked to leave.

Asked how his new music jibed with his religious message, Betha said: “People have it misconstrued. I mean, I’m not religious. That’s the biggest folly right there. I’m not religious. I hate religion. Religion kills people.

“What I have is a personal relationship with God.

“Religion is a book that tells you, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that, and don’t dress like this.’ “