The “utopian experience” on this studio-groove and sample-heavy debut album by P.M. Dawn (aka rapper Prince Be and producer DJ Minutemix) is suffused with an unmistakable melancholy, which makes it a strange and more personal trip. A brief intro yields to a faceful at full force in this laidback landscape, with “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine” setting the tone. It’s more about heartbreak and mourning a time when reality was better, but the double-jointed words lead to the alternate realities lead to the heavenly visions lead to the utopian experience. “Chase the blues away,” Prince Be raps gently. “Take your mind off reality and leave her alone.” Exalted but frequently sad, as the next track “Paper Doll” points up with its sample of “Angola, Louisiana” by Gil-Scott Heron & Brian Jackson and a deepening sadness. It is gorgeous, delivered in bruised purple tones of unknown, secret agony. It also made it to #28 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992 as a follow-on to the freak #1 “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” buried near the back of the album sequentially. “To Serenade a Rainbow,” with its whipcrack sample of Hugh Masakela, is more workmanlike than “Paper Doll,” which in this context may feel more upbeat (“Think I’m gonna fly away / I think I’m gonna fly away,” goes a refrain). It is still a declaration of love that somehow feels futile, and it is followed by “Comatose,” which takes some time getting up to speed and then proceeds like a slow-motion cartoon ambulance, with low-key samples of Sly & the Family Stone and Dr. John squawks and hollers. P.M. Dawn were connoisseurs of the vinyl crates for sure. The first half of this album resolves finally into the first single, “A Watcher’s Point of View (Don’t ‘Cha Think),” which embraces the Doobie Brothers. It goes like that all over this lovely set, occasionally escaping the gloom tinge but never getting too far from it. The biggest hit, of course, was “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” which made it to #1 for a glorious week, sampling Spandau Ballet’s “True” so boldly that it feels more like augmentation of the song than sample or cover. By this point in the album, track 9 of 13, we are deep inside the head of Prince Be and/or his fictional narrator. Our guy, in “Set Adrift,” is tripping exactly on hearing the Spandau Ballet song, which sets him spinning off on memory associations. I know how this goes—it’s a vivid experience that can still occur for me with pop music radio hits. Of the Heart, unwieldy long title and all, has always hit me as psychedelic, maybe just because the person at the center of it feels both real and disconnected from reality, set adrift in his own world. The lofty ambition of the title is absurd but sincere and thus affecting. The anguish is here but measured and precise, funneled into the flow of a larger utopian experience, which somehow feels all the more real for being so unreal, inside this guy’s head.
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