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**P.M. Dawn – Of The Heart, Of The Soul And Of The Cross: The Utopian Experience**
★★★★☆

When P.M. Dawn quietly dissolved into hip-hop history's footnotes, it felt like watching a beautiful dream fade at dawn. Prince Be's passing in 2016 marked the end of one of rap's most enigmatic and spiritually ambitious acts, leaving behind a catalog that still sounds like transmissions from an alternate universe where hip-hop embraced meditation as readily as machismo. Their 1991 debut remains their calling card to eternity – a swirling, psychedelic love letter that proved rap could be as introspective as it was boastful, as tender as it was tough.

Today, "Of The Heart, Of The Soul And Of The Cross" reads like a prophetic blueprint for hip-hop's future evolution. While their contemporaries were perfecting the art of the boast, P.M. Dawn was already exploring the terrain that artists like Kanye West, Kid Cudi, and Drake would later colonize. The album's DNA can be traced through decades of introspective rap, soul-sampling, and the blurring of genre boundaries that defines modern hip-hop. It's the missing link between De La Soul's playful experimentation and the emotional vulnerability that would eventually become rap orthodoxy.

The album's crown jewel, "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss," remains one of hip-hop's most gorgeous anomalies. Built around Spandau Ballet's "True" – a sample choice that raised eyebrows in 1991's harder-edged climate – the track floats on Prince Be's stream-of-consciousness musings about love, loss, and the space between sleeping and waking. It's a song that shouldn't work according to hip-hop's established rules, yet it became their biggest hit precisely because it rewrote those rules entirely. The track's dreamy production and philosophical wordplay created a template for sensitive-thug rap decades before the term existed.

"Paper Doll" showcases the duo's ability to craft intimate narratives without sacrificing their cosmic perspective. Prince Be's vocals drift between singing and rapping with the fluid grace of someone channeling rather than performing, while DJ Minutemix creates sonic landscapes that feel both organic and otherworldly. The song's exploration of relationships and self-perception anticipates the psychological complexity that would later define artists like Frank Ocean and Tyler, The Creator.

The sprawling title track serves as the album's spiritual centerpiece, a nine-minute meditation that moves through multiple movements like a hip-hop symphony. Here, the Cordes brothers' vision reaches its fullest expression – Prince Be's mystical wordplay floating over production that samples everything from classical music to obscure soul records, creating something that feels less like a song than a religious experience.

P.M. Dawn emerged from the unlikely hip-hop hotbed of Jersey City, where brothers Attrell (Prince Be) and Jarrett (DJ Minutemix) Cordes were crafting their otherworldly sound in bedrooms and basement studios. While their East Coast peers were perfecting street narratives and their West Coast counterparts were pioneering G-funk, P.M. Dawn existed in their own dimension entirely. They drew inspiration from Prince, The Beatles, and Eastern philosophy with equal fervor, creating music that sounded like hip-hop beamed in from a more enlightened planet.

The album's creation coincided with hip-hop's golden age expansion, when the genre was exploding in multiple directions simultaneously. While groups like N.W.A and Public Enemy dominated headlines with their confrontational approaches, P.M. Dawn offered an alternative path – one where vulnerability was strength and spirituality was swagger. Their timing was perfect; rap was ready for its sensitive poets, even if it didn't know it yet.

Musically, the album exists in a genre of one – call it psychedelic hip-hop, new age rap, or spiritual soul, but none of those labels quite capture its essence. The production feels weightless yet grounded, dreamy yet focused, combining the rhythmic foundation of hip-hop with the expansive arrangements of progressive rock and the emotional directness of classic soul. It's music for late-night contemplation and early-morning revelation, for lovers and loners, for anyone who ever felt too sensitive for a world that demanded toughness.

"Of The Heart, Of The Soul And Of The Cross" stands as proof that hip-hop's greatest strength has always been its ability to absorb and transform any influence into something uniquely its own