Masta Ace Finds Two Hits in One : Pop music: The rapper’s ‘Born to Roll’ is a remixed version of his underground hit.

Rapper Masta Ace’s hit single “Born to Roll” and his “Jeep A . . . N . . . ,” an underground hit about a year ago, have just a little thing in common. They are the same song. Just remixed, retitled and cleaned up.

“A lot of people still don’t realize that,” explains the veteran New York rapper. “It created some confusion at first.”

Particularly in Houston, where the unreleased “Born to Roll” first caught on at the end of last year. Some fans bought the album, “Slaughtahouse,” by his group, Masta Ace Incorporated, and were irked to find it didn’t include “Born to Roll.”

“Some people took it back,” Masta Ace says. “We didn’t add ‘Born to Roll’ at first because we didn’t think it was necessary. Nobody had any idea the single would take off like it did.”

Now, though, most of the original copies of the album, on Delicious Vinyl/East West, have been removed from stores, in favor of a new version with “Born to Roll” tacked on as the final track.

“Born to Roll” was originally just a studio experiment. “We had no plans to put it out as a single,” Masta Ace says. “I was just doing a remix of ‘Jeep,’ trying different things just for the fun of it. But I came up with something that the label thought was good enough to put on the market.”

In creating “Born to Roll,” he changed the hooks, made the instrumental track more streamlined and bass-heavy, keeping nearly all the lyrics--but leaving out the four-letter words. The new version has a different feel, more playful and less ominous, emphasizing the joys of cruising rather than the hazards of hanging out in the ‘hood. Actually, unless you know the lyrics, you wouldn’t even associate the two versions.

*

The remix was so striking that the label put it out as the B-side to the single “Slaughtahouse”--the third single from the year-old album. “When ‘Born to Roll’ came out, DJs immediately picked up on it,” recalls Mike Ross, president and co-owner of Delicious Vinyl Records. “They started playing it instead of ‘Slaughtahouse.’ ”

Changing the title was important too. “With the original title, which includes words some people don’t like, some stations wouldn’t play the single,” Ross says. “They heard that title and thought it was a gangsta cut. The title was fine for underground acceptance but not for radio acceptance. But ‘Born to Roll’ worked for radio. That’s not why he did the remix--it just turned out that way.”

A Brooklynite whose real name is Duval Clear, Masta Ace, now in his late 20s, turned on to rap when he was in junior high. Even a college education--majoring in marketing at the University of Rhode Island--didn’t cure him of his yen for a rap career. By the late ‘80s, he had become a big name in East Coast rap. But a record deal with Cold Chillun Records, when he was known as Master Ace, only resulted in one album that made no noise outside the East Coast underground. In 1991, he switched to Delicious Vinyl Records.

“We signed him because he’s a very talented rapper who never quite had the exposure and the push he needed,” Ross says. “We thought he had the tools to become more than just a big underground rapper.”

Masta Ace has a dual signature. One part is his slick, smooth-flowing rapping style and the other is his tendency to emphasize the positive side of the black experience. Like many East Coast rappers, he steers clear of gangsta rap. In fact, the sum of the “Slaughtahouse” album is a stinging satire on that violent, X-rated, female-bashing genre.

“I don’t buy into that whole gangsta thing--talking about guns and shooting people and disrespecting women,” Masta Ace says. “Some of that is on my album, but it’s clearly a parody of gangsta. I’m pointing out how stupid it all is, using these characters, MC Negro and the Ignorant MCs. I can appreciate the music and the techniques of gangsta rap but not the content.”

He hopes, he says, “to show fans that you can still be a male rapper and be popular and not have to play that gangsta-rap game.”