Skip to main content

77. P.M. Dawn - Jesus Wept (1995)

In case you aren't a fan of bad television, let me tell you that P.M.Dawn were on the show Hit Me Baby One More Time last night. In this show, musical acts from the '80s and '90s perform two songs, a hit of their own and a hit from today. Then the studio audience votes on who was the best. P.M. Dawn managed to brush off competition from Missing Persons, Shannon, Animotion, and Juice Newton to win the favor of the voters.

In celebration I drug out my copy of P.M. Dawn's third album, Jesus Wept. Of all of their output, this CD intrigues me the most.

We know that P.M. Dawn came onto the scene with Set Adrift On Memory Bliss, a piece of dreamy pop that sampled Spandau Ballet's True. We also know that their second album was an even bigger success, with the ultra-melodic hits I'd Die Without You and Looking Through Patient Eyes. That makes Jesus Wept the classic "artistic statement" record, wherein, feeling assured of their commercial viability, the performer does whatever the hell they want.

So P.M.Dawn abandoned all pretense of being rappers, went even further into a synthesizer-and-melody driven sound, wrote articulate but nonsensical lyrics like "Angels always saturate your schemes", and recorded silence at Martin Luther King Jr.'s grave.

And then there's the God thing. Being a mainstream popular group and calling your album Jesus Wept is either bold or stupid. We all know, when it comes to pop music, albums about the J-man belong in their own small section of the music store. The thing is, Jesus is not mentioned by name anywhere in the songs, nor is this a Bible-thumping album. In fact, the lyrics raise more questions about spiritual matters than they dole out answers. And even though this is an "artistic statement" album, the statement seems to be: I don't really know anything except the fact that I don't know anything.

In fact, the whole album is about searching. The opening song, Downtown Venus, is an electric guitar-driven ode to self discovery: "I could be into me but I don't know what I'm like." Other songs, like My Own Personal Gravity and Apathy...Superstar!? continue this theme. On the latter Prince Be even talks to himself: "Am I unsure? Absolutely."

And in the chorus of that song he tells us, "I think everything's okay / I mean everything's all right / almost everyone I know believes in God and Love." Notice he doesn't say which God; this is not necessarily a Christian spirituality. Why God Loves You is the most direct statement on this topic (and also the catchiest song). Rather than moralizing, Be is tells us to find our inner divinity. It's hard to argue with that.

Other songs seem to approach God in a nearly romantic nature. I'll Be Waiting For You, Forever Damaged (The 96th), and Sometimes I Miss You So Much (which makes good use of an Al B.Sure sample) could all be heard as songs about earthly love or heavenly love. Your choice.

Add in a couple of straight up folk tunes (Sonchyenne, A Lifetime) and a head-scratcher of an album-ending medley that combines Prince' 1999, Talking Heads' Once In A Lifetime, and Harry Nilsson's Coconut, and you have one of the strangest hip-hop albums ever released. It's a ultra-spiritual, non-Christian album called Jesus Wept by a rap group that doesn't drop a single verse on the whole album.

Is it any wonder that it still intrigues me?

Grade: A-
Fave Song: Why God Loves You

Comments

littleboxes said…
Jesus Wept is a great album. It's too bad that Prince Be ended up on that television show. We always thought that they were a very talented group. Nice blog. We were able to find it through City Pages.
Paul V. Allen said…
Thanks for the compliment, and I'm glad you found me!

Popular posts from this blog

12 by Matthew Sweet (2002 - 2021)

Sometimes a huge part of an artist's career has not been summarized. Case in point... Matthew Sweet has a couple of compliations out there, but neither of them cover the past couple of decades, a span that has seen him release 8 albums of original material and 3 albums of covers.  I followed Sweet's career religiously early on, with my ardor gradually diminishing after the magnificant one-two punch of In Reverse (1999) and The Thorns (2003) That's not to say he hasn't produced some great work since then, it's just that it requires bit of effort to pick out the gems. Here's my college try: (Two of these albums are not available on streaming servies, so here's a slightly modified version of the playlist on YouTube .) 1. "I Can't Remember" ( The Thorns , 2003) The Thorns was a rootsy, close-harmony early-aughts version of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, featuring Shawn Mullins (of "Lullaby" fame) and Pete Droge (of "If You Don't Lov

2022: The Album

Since 2003 I've made a mix of some of my favorite songs of the calendar year. Here's the cover art and track listing for the 2022 edition. 1. BODEGA - "Pillar on the Bridge of You" 2. Harry Styles - "Late Night Talking" 3. Vicious Vicious - "Evolution" 4. Hot Freaks - "Lovely" 5. Carly Rae Jepsen - "The Loneliest Time" 6. Tears for Fears - "End of Night" 7. Spoon - "Wild" 8. Death Cab for Cutie - "Here to Forever" 9. Citrine and GUKKO - "Feel Better" 10. Rhett Miller - "Fascination" 11. Broken Bells - "Fade Away" 12. Leah Marlene - "Flowers" 13. Robbie Williams - "The World and Her Mother" 14. Jimmy Eat World - "Something Loud" (acoustic version) 15. Sloan - "Dream It All Over Again" If you have Amazon Unlimited, you can listen at this link . 

Weezer: SZNZ Abbreviated

One of the most oldest and most enticing thought exercises in pop music is: What if (artist) had released the best songs from (double album) as a single disc instead?  Pre-Internet, folks used their cassette decks to create their own truncated versions of likes of The Beatles'  White Album ("Revolution 9" has to go, for sure) and Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (sorry, "Jamaica Jerk-Off"), some out of artistic vision, others because the tape just wasn't long enough to hold all the songs. Now, with mp3s and streaming, we have the ability to curate everything for ourselves, which means even a single album could be reduced to an EP of your faves, with the shuffle feature making it so the order doesn't even have to be the same every time. Here's where I could detour into a healthy digression about the negative consequences of that total freedom, but I'll resist the temptation. Our good friends Weezer - who are not typically known for rest