By Sylvia W. Chan

They say that heaven is 10 zillion light years away / But if there is a God, we need Him now.

Stevie Wonder, "Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away" (1974)

THIS MONTH MASON Betha – the rapper formerly known as Mase – releases Welcome Back (Bad Boy), his first album since leaving the hip-hop game in 1999 to become a Christian minister. The video for the record's first single, also titled "Welcome Back," bursts with a palette of sunny pastels spread over a hot-day-in-Harlem tableau, a landscape carefully orchestrated by director Chris Robinson for a Big Willie, "Summertime"-esque effect that constructs the mainstream hip-hop world Mase is returning to as a dauntlessly cheery place where wholesome hotties, neighborhood shorties, and softhearted homies gather in impromptu sing-alongs and run through spraying fire hydrants during an eternal block party.

Amid it all, a strangely wooden, preternaturally grinning Mase, alternately fitted in pale lemon yellow and fire-engine red casual wear, drops his familiar marble-mouthed flow across a track that borrows its strings-washed, major-key hook from the theme to Welcome Back, Kotter. Dropping lines like "I don't drink liquor and all the games over" and "I'm livin' la vida without the loca," it would seem Pastor Mase is just chillin' back up here in this hip-hop game, shining up the salvation that led to his absence with a secular sheen by never mentioning Jesus or the church. Instead he spits squeaky-clean rhymes that make abundantly clear he's done with blinging, boozing, and boning anyone besides his wife.

Cut to Kanye West, the current darling of hip-hop, donning a preacher's coat in the opening scenes of one of three versions of the video for "Jesus Walks" (available at www.kanyewest.com), a track that's been lauded by critics as "explosive," "apocalyptic," and a "desperate masterpiece." In West's world, he's a reluctant evangelist for the urban masses; director Michael Haussman's video finds him on the pulpit waving a Bible and mopping his brow as his fervent congregation sways like reeds in a rainstorm. One by one, downtrodden subjects – the drunk, the gangbanger, the prostitute – enter West's church, flinging themselves to the ground as the Holy Ghost takes hold. All the while, West struts and gesticulates, telling us he's not here "to convert atheists into believers" but just trying to explain that "the way Kathie Lee needed Regis ... that's the way y'all need Jesus." In a second version of the video, directed by Chris Milk, West ups the iconography of his messianic ante, trading in the black preacher's jacket for a crisp white suit in which he works the same minister-like moves before a wall of flames as a suspiciously halo-like fluorescent disk glows over his head and images of chain gangs, border patrols, burning crosses, and Klan rallies flash over the cut's deliberate, plodding rhythms. In all three versions, the tone is grim, desperate, and sepia-toned, a marked attempt to frame West's "message" as an impassioned plea for salvation in a world gone wrong.

Saved?

Place the images side by side and ironies and questions abound. The minister dressed up like a rapper. The rapper dressed up a like a minister. The "saved" spouts secular optimism, and the "heathen" preaches religious hell and damnation. I'm not even touching the fact that West's Jesus is whiter than his suit in all three videos, or that Mase swore in his 2001 autobiography, Revelations: There's a Light after the Lime, that all hip-hop was the work of the devil, including "even gospel rap." Who's sincere, and who's the charlatan? Who's the preacher, and who's the snake-oil peddler? Does either offer anything other than canned feel-good sentiments, whether in the form of the jiggy pastor's comeback or a Roc-a-fella's consciousness? What takes a bigger ego: to pretend you don't have faith or to pretend you do? Does either really have faith in anything? And perhaps most important, do you have faith in either of them?

I don't. And it has nothing to with what Ministers Mase and West actually believe or don't believe. Heck, I hope that Mase really does think hip-hop is a happy place to preach the Word and that Kanye reads scripture as often as his bank statements. No, it has a lot more to do with the fact that if there was ever a time when I ultimately and unequivocally realized heaven was even farther away from our current pop-music cultural landscape than the 10 zillion light years Stevie estimated 30 years ago, it'd be right about now – a moment when spirituality is routinely sliced, diced, and served up in low- or no-carb portions. These days Mase is the most spiritual brother on the block; West can float, without irony, a simile comparing how a vapid, talk show personality needs her cohost the same way folks need salvation; and during the finale of this year's American Idol competition, a commentator asked socialite Nicole Richie what she thought of the show, and she cooed, "I love it. I watch it religiously," while a gospel choir hired to back up the two finalists' renditions of "I Believe" worked to lend a putative spiritual legitimacy to the rah-rah "Capitalism will save us" sentiment that clearly governed the whole affair.

Belief effort

Pop music has always shaped our belief systems in this country – e.g., in the 1960s and '70s, the Beatles' stints with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi sent young white liberals scurrying toward "Eastern" and "Oriental" religions, while Public Enemy sporting "Fruit of Islam" T-shirts and infusing their rhymes with references to Louis Farrakhan and Elijah Mohammad on 1988's classic It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam) renewed African American interest in the teachings of both the Nation of Islam and orthodox Islam. What the Idol phenomenon and the packaging of West's and Mase's new releases reveal, however, is that the latest phase of American "belief" via pop music has finally gone the route of much of the music itself, akin to what music critic Nelson George (speaking about R&B) deemed "death" back in 1988 – a stage where religion, spirituality, and faith have become nothing more than marketing ploys in the inextricably tangled circuits of the music industry's money, a means toward the ends of making you spend yours. Case in point: West frets, "If I talk about God my record won't get played" on "Jesus Walks." The song will "take away from my spins ... which will probably take away from my ends." He then goes and makes three big-budget versions of the video. Go figure, huh?

The heartbreaking thing about it all is that I think many of us still want to believe in popular music as a site of redemption, a potentially transformative plane where hearts, minds, and souls converge. That's why we continually wax nostalgic for albums like A Love Supreme, why we long for the rush of a packed club, why we're so quick to glom onto anything that even faintly glimmers with "something real." It's why we struggle over our relationships with music at all – because we understand it to be a place where ideologies are made, where beliefs are formulated, and ultimately, where we learn how to be. Looking over some of my own musings on pop music over the past decade, I'm struck by how often I've employed phrases like "soul-stirring" and "sonic redemption" in describing often-forgettable artists and mediocre albums, a reflection of my own inability to comprehend what true "belief" might actually entail. Because it's incredibly easy to seek out solace in sounds, to believe that if you can feel the swell of a phrase, be moved to tears by a song – in other words, if you think you can hear God – then that's all you need. The problem is, the very nature of what pop music says faith is these days (according to those like Mase, West, the folks behind American Idol) has been, in so many ways, contaminated beyond belief. It's so rooted in Clear Channel and Viacom that it can't transcend jack.

Don't misunderstand. I'm not shutting the door on music or throwing my hands up in "kids these days" defeatism to go meditate in a cave. I'm just suggesting that in the end, during such trying times, it might serve us well to heed the contemplations of those more invested in souls than sales when seeking higher ground. For example, in Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, music is simultaneously viewed as a path toward transcendence and a cause of potential spiritual harm, a seeming contradiction I've often approached by placing the words of 10th-century Sufi mystic and scholar Ibn Hamdan beside the overlying sentiment in the writings of 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi. In much of his poetry, Rumi continuously cautions the reader "to go deeper" (i.e., that despite their immense possibilities, books, words, language – the material tools of his trade – simply cannot serve as a substitute for spiritual pursuits or for living itself). Thus, in these days when so much of music is inextricably bound to material ends, Hamdan's warning seems an apt caveat to those (such as myself) who might wax hopeful for music's ability to "save": "Be sure that you do not train yourself to music," he wrote, "in case this holds you back from even higher perceptions."