I recently acquired a sealed original press vinyl copy of Public Enemy’s 1991 album “Apocalypse ‘91”.

This album generally marks the end of Public Enemy’s original style of layering samples to create their songs. Tracks like “By the Time I Get to Arizona”, “Can’t Truss It”, and “Shut ‘Em Down” continued their production and lyrical excellence.

A sealed original press of this album is difficult to find, but there are no solid metrics that quantify just how rare it is. The math is so much more uncertain than with sports cards. For example, when you pull a Panini parallel numbered to 100, you know that 100 copies exist and maybe 10-20% of those will forever remain in sealed packs, so 80-90 will eventually reach circulation. Calculating the number of sealed vinyl copies of this record is much more of a black box. North of 1 million copies were sold, but that includes CD, cassette, and vinyl - the last of which was fading from common usage. Perhaps we estimate that 25% of all copies sold were vinyl; that means about 250,000-300,000 vinyl copies exist. How many of those were never opened? Impossible to tell. If media grading takes off like I think it will, eventually we’ll have a more clear picture of rarity.

I’m planning to get this graded and slabbed next year.