The 1990s File Feature
The Ways Of The Wind
The Ways Of The Wind — P.M. Dawn's Gentle RevolutionAlternative Hip-Hop at Its Most UnguardedIn 1993, P.M. Dawn occupied a strange and somewhat precarious po…
01 The Story
The Ways Of The Wind — P.M. Dawn's Gentle Revolution
Alternative Hip-Hop at Its Most Unguarded
In 1993, P.M. Dawn occupied a strange and somewhat precarious position in the hip-hop landscape. The New Jersey duo, consisting of brothers Attrell and Jarrett Cordes (better known as Prince Be and DJ Minutemix), had been making music that many hip-hop purists found baffling: lush, melodic, spiritually inclined tracks that drew as heavily from classic soul and new age sensibilities as from street-credibility rap. Set Adrift on Memory Bliss had been a massive hit two years earlier, and its success had bought the group the freedom to continue on their own terms.
The Ways of the Wind came from their second album The Bliss Album...? (Vibrations of Love and Anger and the Ponderance of Life and Existence), a title that tells you something precise about where their heads were. The album was released in 1993 and leaned further into the introspective, psychedelic quality that had distinguished their debut. No concessions were made to the dominant sounds of the moment; P.M. Dawn was making the music they heard, and if the mainstream wanted to meet them, it knew where to find them.
A Sound Like Nothing Else on the Chart
The production on The Ways of the Wind is genuinely distinctive. Soft, looping beats underpin a melodic structure that feels closer to dream-pop than to anything the 1993 rap charts were typically producing. Prince Be's vocal delivery is hushed and wondering, more meditation than proclamation. The track moves with a patience that was unusual in an era when hip-hop production was generally accelerating toward harder, more kinetic sounds.
The arrangement draws on sample culture in the P.M. Dawn tradition, weaving found sounds and musical fragments into a texture that feels organic rather than mechanically assembled. Prince Be was responsible for the distinctive artistic direction of the group's sound, and his fingerprints are all over the track's refusal to sound like anything else on the radio that summer.
Eleven Weeks on the Hot 100
The Ways of the Wind debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on July 24, 1993, entering at position 88. The climb was steady over the weeks that followed, the song finding its audience gradually without any sudden promotional spike. It reached its peak position of number 54 during the week of September 4, 1993, settling comfortably in the upper half of the chart for a brief but meaningful stretch.
The track spent 11 weeks on the Hot 100, a respectable showing that confirmed P.M. Dawn's capacity to generate real commercial traction despite their resistance to genre convention. The audience that loved them loved them specifically because of the strangeness, not in spite of it.
Context and Consequence
P.M. Dawn's artistic approach in this period was not without its complications. The group became better known in some circles for an incident involving KRS-One and questions about their hip-hop authenticity than for the music itself, which was unfortunate given the genuine originality of what they were producing. The brothers maintained their artistic vision across multiple albums regardless of external pressure, which is a more difficult thing to do than it might appear from the outside.
The song has gathered 98 million YouTube views in the years since its 1993 chart run, a figure that speaks to continued discovery by listeners who find in P.M. Dawn's music something absent from both the hip-hop mainstream and the pop mainstream: a kind of gentle, searching spiritual quality that goes down smooth and leaves a residue of genuine feeling. Press play and let the waves of it wash over you.
The duo never received the full critical reassessment their catalog deserved during their active years, but listeners kept finding the music regardless. That gap between critical recognition and genuine audience connection is itself a kind of tribute to what P.M. Dawn built: music that did not require institutional approval to reach the people who needed it most.
“The Ways Of The Wind” — P.M. Dawn's singular moment on the 1990s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Ways Of The Wind — Spirit, Nature, and the Search for Peace
Transcendence as Pop Music
P.M. Dawn's lyrical world was unusual territory for the Billboard Hot 100 in 1993. While the chart was populated with material focused on romantic dynamics, street narratives, and dance-floor imperatives, the brothers Cordes were writing songs that reached toward something harder to categorize: a sense of spiritual openness, a curiosity about the nature of consciousness and connection, an impulse toward peace that felt genuinely countercultural rather than performatively alternative.
The Ways of the Wind sits squarely within that tradition. The title image suggests the unknowable quality of existence, the way life moves through us and around us without being entirely graspable or directable. Wind as metaphor carries a long history in both religious and secular poetry, and P.M. Dawn used it with awareness of that tradition, filtering ancient imagery through contemporary production to arrive at something that felt both timeless and specific to 1993.
The Spiritual Dimension
Prince Be spoke openly throughout his career about the spiritual influences on his work, drawing on traditions that combined elements of Christian mysticism, new age philosophy, and personal metaphysics into an idiosyncratic worldview that shaped every lyric he wrote. The spiritual underpinning of P.M. Dawn's music distinguished them sharply from nearly every other act on the early-1990s hip-hop landscape.
This was not commercial positioning; it was genuine artistic expression. And it resonated with a specific audience that was hungry for music that addressed their inner lives rather than their exterior circumstances. The listeners who loved P.M. Dawn in 1993 were looking for something that the harder and more aggressive currents of that musical moment were not providing.
Emotional Texture and Accessibility
What made The Ways of the Wind work as a commercial single despite its unusual qualities was its emotional accessibility. The spiritual themes were expressed in language that didn't require specialized knowledge or shared belief to understand. The feeling the song conveyed, a kind of open-handed acceptance of life's mystery combined with a longing for connection and peace, was universal enough to transcend the specific philosophical framework that produced it.
The track spent 11 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 54 during the week of September 4, 1993. That performance reflected an audience that engaged genuinely with the material rather than merely tolerating it as background noise. You don't spend that many weeks on the chart by accident or by radio promotion alone.
A Lasting Gentleness
The song has collected 98 million YouTube views, and the comments sections on these videos tend toward the unusually thoughtful, with listeners noting the healing quality of the music, its capacity to produce calm in anxious moments. That response is not incidental to the song's meaning; it is the meaning. P.M. Dawn were trying to make music that did something to the listener's interior state, and decades of evidence suggest that they succeeded.
In a cultural moment defined by aggression and acceleration, there is something quietly radical about a hip-hop duo making music this patient, this gentle, this willing to let space and silence do part of the work. The Ways of the Wind has aged into something that sounds more necessary, not less, as the decades accumulate. It offers what good spiritual art has always offered: a moment of stillness inside the noise.
→ More from the 1990s File
View all 1990s hits →
Keep digging