![]() Entire songs waft by without any drums, and when drums do show up, they’re breakbeat shuffles that, in 1993, signified house music as much as they did rap, especially with the pianos P.M. ![]() The only guest on the whole LP is Boy George, gently wrapping his voice around Prince Be’s on “More Than Likely.” There’s a cover of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” that flirts with the Beatles’ starry-eyed psych-rock the same way the Beatles, at the moment they recorded the original, were flirting with Eastern modalities. On the album’s first chorus, Prince Be croons, “I cry when midnight sighs,” whatever that means. It’s soft, frilly, nebulous, willfully feminine. And even more than their 1991 debut, The Bliss Album…? scans as a punk-as-fuck reaction against KRS’s hardass preacherisms. It’s the first album the duo released after the KRS attack, and the last one they released as a commercially viable entity. Dawn’s legacy a couple of decades later, it becomes increasingly apparent that they’ve got a whole lot more to do with rap circa-2013 than old reductive KRS does. The reality was probably a whole lot messier and sadder, as realities tend to be. I always pictured KRS lifting Prince Be over his head and Ultimate Warrior gorilla press-slamming him into the crowd. And as a young rap nerd, it was perhaps the greatest example of KRS’s unimpeachable badassery. It’s the sort of moment that would’ve absolutely broken the internet if it had happened in the YouTube era. Dawn’s granny-glassesed Prince Be had airily wondered this: “KRS-One wants to be a teacher, but a teacher of what?” The bum-rush was KRS’s vehement answer. At that show, KRS-One and his goons stormed the stage when the duo were performing, pushing them off the stage and commandeering it to perform KRS’s Boogie Down Productions song “I’m Still #1.” A little while earlier, in an interview with Details, P.M. ![]() ![]() Dawn’s most significant pop cultural moment came a few months later, at an MTV-sponsored January 1992 show at New York’s Sound Factory. Dawn’s biggest hit was 1991’s Spandau Ballet-sampling “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss,” the first-ever Billboard #1 from a non-white rapper, and the first from anyone who wasn’t Vanilla Ice or Marky Mark. ![]()
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