Set Adrift on Memory Bliss
1991 single by P.M. Dawn
"Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" is a song by American hip-hop group P.M. Dawn, released in August 1991 by Gee Street and Island Records as the second single from their debut album, Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience (1991). It is built around samples of Spandau Ballet's "True", the Soul Searchers' "Ashley's Roachclip", and the Bob James version of Paul Simon's "Take Me to the Mardi Gras", with the remainder of the song written by P.M. Dawn vocalist Attrell "Prince Be" Cordes. Only Prince Be and "True" writer Gary Kemp were credited for writing the track.
The song was P.M. Dawn's only number-one hit on the US Billboard Hot 100, and it was the first number-one song after the debut of the Nielsen SoundScan system, which monitored airplay and sales more closely than before, when Billboard had to rely on manual sales reports and airplay data. According to the test charts of the SoundScan system, "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" was at number one for at least three weeks but officially has a one-week reign at number one. Worldwide, it reached number one in New Zealand, number three in the United Kingdom, and number seven in Australia. Its music video was directed by Mark Pellington. The song was ranked number 81 on VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop." Blender ranked it at number 94 in their list of "Greatest Songs Since You Were Born" in 2005.
Composition
Attrell "Prince Be" Cordes told in a 1991 Melody Maker interview about the song's conception, "I have to like a song before I can deal with it, the music comes first. I've always liked that Spandau Ballet song, it's so dreamy and trance-like, so when I came to deal with it, I knew I'd be daydreaming along to that one.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3480618. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.