P.M. Dawn was different from the start. They followed in the footsteps of one of their idols, Jimi Hendrix, by beginning their career in earnest in England. Signed to Gee Street records, they didn’t come up in the hip-hop tradition of selling records out of the trunk of their car, but rather rode the “Ashley’s Roachclip” beat out of the clubs in London, perhaps never to better effect than on their debut hit, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss.” Built from a sample of Spandau Ballet’s “True”, but draped in even more layers of ethereal vocal harmonies, the song illustrates perfectly that all of P.M. Dawn’s obsessions and brilliance were fully formed from the start.

The structure of the song exemplifies Attrell’s hit formula during the rise and peak of the group’s commercial success. There’s a classic break beat, which today sounds like pure dance but which was at the time just as evocative of serious hip-hop in the Eric B. and Rakim vein. Over the beat, that Spandau Ballet sample, which promised crossover success while still being undeniably catchy enough to bring along reluctant hip-hop fans. And then there’s the rhymes. At the same time that LL was screaming his way through “Mama Said Knock You Out”, Prince Be delivers his lyrics just above a whisper. And not LL’s sexy and urgent “I Need Love” whisper, but the murmur of someone thinking aloud while nobody else is home.

In their signature hit, like all their songs, P.M. Dawn’s lyrics are vivid, evocative, inscrutable.

The camera pans to a cocktail glass

Behind a blind of plastic plants

I find a lady with a fat diamond ring

And then you know I can’t remember a damn thing

The scene described is hard to place, but it does seem to loosely fit one scenario: The words can be read as a recapitulation of the opening moments of Prince’s 1986 cinematic flop, Under the Cherry Moon. Ordinarily, it’d be absurd to think the lyrics to a Top 10 pop hit include a Prince reference so obscure that Questlove would struggle to recall it, but this is from Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience, an album where one of the other songs (“Reality Used To Be A Friend Of Mine”) actually samples dialogue from the movie Under the Cherry Moon. Similarly obscure cultural references continue throughout the song, with almost deliberately inaccessible moments like the Tribe Called Quest-meets-Married With Children nod, “Christina Applegate, you gotta put me on.”

But of course, the song dates to a time when Dennis Miller was still funny; obscure references were an even more meaningful way of signifying social belonging in the pre-Wikipedia, pre-Google, pre-Genius era. And rather than signifying street realness, Prince Be was signifying catholic cultural tastes that were unapologetically middle class, as likely to be white as black, more likely to be wounded than boastful.

Even in an era where the Spandau Ballet sample was widely considered too brazen and too prominent to be legitimate hip-hop, the song’s charm was undeniable, and set a pattern not just for the group’s future work, but for pop radio overall. When one-hit-wonder Gerardo wanted to follow up his signature “Rico Suave”, he was shamelessly ripping off Set Adrift in his song “Love”; by the time mega-popular boy band Color Me Badd was searching for a new sound a few years later, they would go to the same well with their song “Choose”, under the guidance of hands no less gifted than super-producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

Even Prince Be himself would revisit P.M. Dawn’s signature song just a few years later, when he was asked to produce a track for the Backstreet Boys’ eponymous 1997 album—which would go on to become one of the most successful albums of all time.

The effort yielded a revamped version of the song, complete with new lyrics, along with what was likely one of the most lucrative production gigs of Prince Be’s career.

But at the dawn of the 90s, P.M. Dawn enjoyed a brief moment where they captured a truly new sound and the attention of the world and it seemed they would be able to ride that wave of success almost indefinitely.