The deal for Mase to be officially signed to 50 Cent's G-Unit Records isn't done yet, but the first recording from the new alliance surfaced on mixtapes last week. It's a record called "300 Shots" that finds 50, Mase, Young Buck, Mobb Deep, M.O.P., Tony Yayo and Lloyd Banks trading verses for more than seven minutes.

So when will the Mase deal be signed, sealed and delivered? After all, he is walking around wearing a G-Unit spinner.

"We're working on it," 50 said during VMA weekend in Miami. "We're in the studio now" .

Yes, Mase is great songwriter like 50, and he has history of platinum success. Still, everyone is bewildered by the partnership, considering that Mase is a reverend and the G-Unit are anything but choir boys. That, 50 says, is what makes it an ideal allegiance.

"Mase is perfect," Fif said. "[The doubters] don't understand: I don't want to turn my company into something that's just on the top of the FBI [most-wanted] list."

50 also confirmed what we heard on "300 Shots": The new Mase music is going to sound like the old Mase music — the real old Mase music, pre-Bad Boy, when he was named Mase Murda (or Murder Mase).

"Mase, with a little Murda," is the way Fif described the music being made by the reverend, who raps about leaving a hole in a man's chest on "300 Shots." ("Put guns in n---as mouths like, 'Who you d issing?'/ Be a year before they know you was missing/ I pop n---as in the chest, they never breath again.")

"I think his decision [to leave rap years ago] was so drastic, people don't understand what he did, 'cause he was in a really good space," 50 said. "He felt that was his calling at the time. But at the same time, I think they misinterpreted it."

50 said that he and Mase talk often, and Mase has even advised him and helped keep him out of a few troublesome situations. 50 said he did not hold his tongue either when they discussed Mase's five-year hiatus from rap.

"I had a conversation with him," 50 recalled. "I said, 'Mase, you was selling 4 million records at that time. If you felt that way [about changing your message] and made an album at the time about the way you felt — wouldn't you have reached more people than Farrakhan reached with the Million Man March, if you got four million people buying your CD?"

"300 Shots" is all over the mixtape circuit and the Internet now. The official home for it is on the G-Unit mixtape G-Unit Radio Part 13: Return of the Mixtape Millionaire. Mase also has his own mixtape coming out with DJ Whoo Kid, and is one of the artists contributing to 50's Get Rich or Die Tryin' soundtrack, coming later this year.

Credits: MTV/ Shaheem Reid