Remembering Prince Be of P.M. Dawn, a nostalgist who heard the future

Until last week, P.M. Dawn’s biggest hit seemed fixed in a distant era — in two distant eras, actually.

Released in 1991, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, thanks at least in part to the familiarity of its sizable sample from “True” by the new wave group Spandau Ballet. Later, after P.M. Dawn’s popularity faded, the song made its way onto garishly decorated compilations alongside tunes by Wilson Phillips and Color Me Badd: an artifact of the early ’90s built upon an artifact of the early ’80s.

Listen again to “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” though — as I’ve been doing since P.M. Dawn’s frontman, Prince Be, died Friday at age 46 from complications of diabetes — and you realize how modern the song sounds. The only thing that really ties it to its time is the drum loop, a hip-hop staple of pre-digital production. (Also maybe the reference to Christina Applegate.) But the rest of the song could fit easily on a rap record from the past year or two.

There’s the crisp guitar lick and gauzy keyboard textures, as enveloping as Drake’s “Views.” There’s the catchy, half-sung vocal melody, another hallmark of Drake’s work. And most of all, there’s the ambivalence and self-doubt in Prince Be’s lyric, in which he keeps doubling back on himself.

×

“I often wonder what makes her work,” he says, describing a woman he encounters in a dream-like vision. “I guess I’ll leave that question to the experts.” Then he goes even further (and possibly invents hashtag rap in the process): “Assuming that there are some out there / They’re probably alone / Solitaire.”

At a moment when certainty was the default stance in hip-hop, here was a guy willfully undercutting his own authority, a quietly radical move that later would resonate with Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar.

So — memory bliss? Sure: This song was full of the past in 1991, and it’s even fuller now with the quarter-century’s worth of associations we bring to it.

But “Set Adrift” is also a premonition. Today, let’s remember Prince Be for what he foresaw.

Twitter: @mikaelwood