Didn’t they appear on that ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ show? With Vernon Kay and a battle of the bands between old one-hit wonder acts?

I don’t care.

I love that first album to be enough for me.

The musical song “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” is such a beautiful song that I wish I was listening to it right now!!

Any band that pisses off KRS-ONE has my vote.

I once said on The Real ILM that Spandau Ballet existed to sire the “True” riff which PM Dawn gladly sampled.

The Bliss Album...? is a near-classic: Boy George’s second-best vocal (“More Than Likely”), a terrific Beatles cover, terrible bad-boy hip-hop, and the most attractive New Age banality ever recorded.

and the album after that, jesus wept, has the awesome “downtown venus,” which falls exactly halfway between prince and r.e.m.

PM Dawn seemed to have aged better than Dream Warriors, the other “hip” alterna-rap act from the early 90’s...

aw I regret selling back my copy of the first Dreamwarriors album.

yeah my mate jason insisted to me once drunk that the lyric

“i wanted her to be a big pm dawn fan” was his favourite ever.

“PM Dawn seemed to have aged better than Dream Warriors, the other ”hip“ alterna-rap act from the early 90’s...”

Um...aren’t we forgetting the unforgettable ME Phi ME? Here’s the wiki to refresh you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_phi_me

But I completely dispute the claim that they/he are “multi-platinum selling,” unless they are counting the sales of the Reality Bites soundtrack.

To thread: Us3, Digable Planets, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, The Pharcyde.

and definition of sound!

Pharcyde>>Digables>>Del>>Dream Warriors>>>>PM Dawn>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>US3

what about Definition of Sound? UK, with awesome samples.

lest we forget: New Kingdom, Earthling

sheesh, seems that most of the critical-darling rap acts get kicked to the curb while the likes of *insert, oh, some mid-level shoegaze band here* continue to be feted...

I don’t remember anything about Definition of Sound or Earthling... New Kingdom were great but they NEVER had a hit, and definitely weren’t on the level of exposure as the others mentioned so far (at least not in any way I can remember)

well, they weren’t huge commercially, but you couldn’t tell that by thumbing through say, the Wire, in 1995...

Agree with Alfred about The Bliss Album, one of my ten favourite albums of the ’90s. Always heard them as kind of the Al Green and the Joni Mitchell and the Roxy Music of hip-hop. (Always secretly wished they’d construct a song around the “Mother of Pearl” beat.) They had zero influence on hip-hop, which is hip-hop’s loss, I think.

anyway, I don’t hear any connection whatsoever between P.M. Dawn and the others listed here (at least those I’ve heard: US3, Digable Planets, Dream Warriors).

I haven’t heard “Downtown Venus”; it’ll give me something to do this afternoon.

My favorite song of theirs is probably “About Nothing (For the Love of Destiny).”

People like PM Dawn? Seriously? Not in an ironic way?

Yeah, a great one, and a classic P.M. Dawn title!

I like “Downtown Venus” a lot, though it’s not typical of the dreamy stuff I generally go for by them—they go for more of a Deep Purple “Hush” feel. Sort of a great one-off fluke for them.

People like PM Dawn? Seriously? Not in an ironic way?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

But you’re hardly the first to imply such a thing. I’ve encountered lots of people (usually hip-hop fans) who think my love for them is either a joke or proof of my own lameness. Like I said, hip-hop seriously went off the rails by fearing these guys in the first place.

“fearing”

Yeah, fearing, as in a reaction against them that was often homophobic in nature.

“Fat guy talking in effeminiate lilt, duetting with Boy George, sampling Spandau Ballet, and wearing Afro wear” = scary fag.

I’m a reformed backpack dork, so yeah, my dislike is probably a kneejerk thing. But, either way, “Set Adrift” is torture, as are “True” and every other song that’s sample “True”. This is probably more Tears For Fears’ fault than PM Dawn’s, but they chose to sample it, so fuck them.

Err, shit Spandeau ballet, not Tears For Fears.

I don’t think “Set Adrift” holds up with their best (the second album is a big advancement on the first, though the first has “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine,” which is one of their greatest). I admit that the first time I heard “Set Adrift” (really loud, in a record store) I was positively repelled. The Spandau thing just seemed so bleeding obvious.

Tears for Fears?

By the fourth or fifth listen it seemed bleeding obvious but in a good way!

(sorry x-post)

I’m just trying to imagine this hypothetical other direction hip-hop would’ve gone in if it hadn’t been “afraid” of PM Dawn

But I was kind of under the impression that they were only liked by people like my mega-square white aunt, who, when finding out I liked hiphop a lot, started raving to me about the greaatness of Arrested Development.

xp I grew up in the 90s so heard “Set Adrift” for years and years before I heard “True”, so it’s def. not a reaction to obviousness of sample,

I mean cuz by and large PM Dawn did not really seem interested in hip hop

but that’s my point—regardless of whether it was “fear” (and that’s obviously not the full story), you’d have to imagine it, because it never really went there.

Scott’s stressing of the PM Dawn-Roxy analogy is a good one (I think Eric Weisbard said something similar in the big SPIN book) — neither act gave a shit about the genre into which they were categorized; it was all sound and vision.

but what could/should hip hop have taken from PM Dawn? New Age platitudes? 80s synthpop sampling?

I’ve probably said this on the real ILM, but Of the Heart was the first album I ever owned on CD, and they were probably my first real “favorite band.”

I never followed them after The Bliss Album, though, and I hardly listen to them today. I do still listen to Digable Planets, whose debut is a far more consistent album than any of the other alt-rap albums of the early 1990s, which by the end of 9th grade probably made up half my CD collection (I also had Me Phi Me, Arrested Development, and Us3.)

Who are Me Phi Me? I’m not sure I’m familiar with them.

I suppose that’s probably a singular is.

It was one guy. He was the in thing for about two months in summer 1992, ended up on the Reality Bites soundtrack, and then was never heard from again.

Digable Planets’ Reachin’ is probably a better album than The Bliss Album...? song-for-song, although I listen to neither more than De La’s Buhloone Mindstate, their own contribution to jazz-rap.

x-post:

see also Justin Warfield pre-She Wants Revenge

[to shakey’s]

more vulnerability, more overt prettiness, probably more synthiness, yeah, and probably more new age platitudes at least insofar as recognizing (if not really saying anything particularly meaningful about) the unreality of the whole “real” thing. (Not saying I wish everyone in hip-hop sounded like P.M. Dawn, by the way, just surprised at how anomalous they were.)

when i said Al Green above, I think I mean that I see P.M. Dawn’s relationship to most other hip-hoppers of the period (more the gangsta stuff than the jazzy stuff, granted) as sort of an Al Green/Stylistics vs. Otis Redding/Wilson Pickett kind of thing.

I was a big fan of their hit “I’d Die Without Jews” which I really related to since all my doctors back then were Jewish.

Okay, seriously, I do love “I’d Die Without You.” Not kidding.

I thought it was “I’d Die Without Shoes.”

I used to play HORSE with my friend Steve while listening to The Bliss Album, and we’d sing “Plastic! What? Basketball.” True.

It makes me happy to see this thread get 50 hits, but I’d be happier still if more people posting had followed the band through their “Dearest Christian...” album, and had heard their pretty great T-Rex rip-off.

In another PM Dawn thread, sometime in the past, someone posted the b-side to Downtown Venus (not on the album/cd) which was pretty fabulous and also in semi-rock mode: “Downtown Venus” is great, but not a one-off by any means. On the same album as Venus, “Apathy, Superstar” is right up there.

Pisces—“yeah my mate jason insisted to me once drunk that the lyric
”i wanted her to be a big pm dawn fan“ was his favourite ever.”

your friend Jason should meet my friend Eric. he constantly says that.

“Apathy, Superstar” is better than “Downtown Venus”. On that album, “Puppet Show” has the same hook as Julian Cope’s “Head”. I love the crap out of Jesus Wept—even the moment of silence from the grave of Martin Luther King and the “1999/Once In A Lifetime/Coconut” mashup with the piano bit from the Schoolhouse Rock “Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla” song.

PM Dawn actually did a gig this year at Maxwells in Hoboken of all places. Prince B was living in the apartment next door to me for 2 years in Jersey City and was a sweet fella! He was actually recording MC Paul Barman back then...

The one time I saw Public Enemy Chuck D said something like “hur, go and listen to yr PM Dawn records” in a rik mayall way.

Maybe they seemed too easy listening for them. “feared” may be about right.

I liked “ watcher’s point of view” best, ah heck even the spand sample as “that record was created for PM Dawn to sample” as I disliked the original.