"Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" (P.M. Dawn)

They weren't exactly hip-hop.  They definitely weren't mainstream R&B.  In fact, they were pariahs in both worlds.  
Their hippie look, art house vibe, and psychedelic spirituality got them figuratively beat up in the R&B world.  Then, after the group's frontman Attrell Cordes (a.k.a. Prince Be) publicly dissed Boogie Down Productions' Lawrence Parker (a.k.a. KRS-One) in a 1991 Details magazine interview (stating, "KRS-One wants to be a teacher, but a teacher of what?"), they literally got beat up.  In January 1992, KRS-One marched on stage at an MTV-sponsored P.M. Dawn show in New York and physically threw Prince Be off the stage.  Any modicum of credibility that P.M. Dawn had in the rap world pretty much disintegrated at that moment.
As a music lover, I couldn't have cared less about the beef with KRS-One or the clothes they wore.  My only occasional gripe was that they culled the mainstream a little too eagerly for samples and musical inspiration.  (Ex: 1993's "Looking Through Patient Eyes" is little more than George Michael's 1988 single "Father Figure" with a different beat.  It made me question whether they were the sellouts others claimed they were.)
While I can't deny that "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" (1991) is wholly built upon Spandau Ballet's "True," I also can't deny that it's catchy as hell.  Who would have thought that flinging the "True" riff to the breakbeat from "Ashley's Roachclip" by the Soul Searchers (better known as the beat from Eric B. & Rakim's classic "Paid In Full") would have worked so well?  
In signature P.M. Dawn fashion, the song is a mix of spoken word and lush, breathy crooning, the subject matter being infatuation, unrequited love, and longing—again, not exactly common hip-hop fare.   Prince Be even throws in some obscure references to Joni Mitchell (the whole part about The camera pans the cocktail glass / Behind a blind of plastic plants is a reworking of a stanza from Mitchell's "The Boho Dance" from her 1975 album The Hissing of Summer Lawns). 
Despite the heat P.M. Dawn took at the time, "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" is a singular statement.  I can't think of another single from the 1990s that made me want to do the running man and get lost in philosophical thought about the nature of love, at the same time.