After two years of scoping out eBay and Discogs, I was finally able to land a sealed original press vinyl copy of Public Enemy’s 1989 album “Fear of a Black Planet” in great condition and for a very reasonable price.

The next step is to send this vinyl off to VMG for grading. Public Enemy’s music is art as much as it is music, and this album deserves to be encapsulated and displayed like a classic painting.

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.

Went to A LOT of Knicks games at MSG growing up in the 80s/90s… was 11 yo and def remember this game with my dad and bro. I had the stub all these years and just recently sent to Beckett. The treat was finding a sealed baggie with the tape + sweat towel given out during that 1993 playoff series - didn’t even know I had it until my parents dropped off a few boxes of stuff for me during a move!

Opened the baggie and got the tape encapsulated 🤌… towel for decoration now 😂

It’s just a great image and totally captures why I like collecting! I don’t do it for “investment” or as a biz, but these little artifacts take me back and it’s a great feeling.

Go NY go! 🏀

I’ve been obsessed with the Deep Six album ever since seeing it on display at the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame about 20 years ago. I tracked down a sealed copy not long after and recently slabbed it for preservation. The Deep Six lp is a piece of grunge history, featuring some of the earliest recordings from grunge pioneers like Soundgarden, Green River (Stone and Jeff before Pearl Jam as well as Mark and Steve before Mudhoney), Malfunkshun featuring Andy Wood who would later form Mother Love Bone with Stone and Jeff, the Melvin’s, U-Men, and Skin Yard who featured Matt Cameron of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and famed Sub Pop producer, Jack Endino. The album was released in 1986 and limited to only 2000 copies. @Vintage_Media_Grading #grunge #vmg

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