In my mailbox today was a 7” vinyl promo copy of the song “Public Enemy #1” by Public Enemy. Released in 1987, this is the first single that they distributed as a group. White label demo copies such as these were usually the first batch off the press and were sent to radio stations, DJs, media outlets, etc.
Did they only make 500 of these? 5,000? 10,000? Probably no way to know, but the fact that this is one of the first Public Enemy vinyl singles ever pressed is amazing to me. I don’t know why promo copies aren’t a bigger thing in the vinyl world.

Once again, another great music group despite being short-lived with only starting their journey in music in 1965 with a quick break up in 1968. They had a very short reunion in 1971 to make their album People Like Us but broke up that same year just after the album was released.
They produced five albums with their time together and had 6 of their 17 singles make it on the Billboard Top 10 selling 40 million records worldwide! Their most popular song is definitely California Dreamin’ which has over 1 billion streams alone on Spotify!
With with all that being said, this card definitely has a place in my collection for being somewhat of a hard card to find seeing that I’m a pretty avid collector of Dutch Gum cards, this is the first time I’ve ever seen a copy of this card before.
❗️Plenty more posts to come. ❗️

As I’ve posted about earlier, I collect sealed music singles that are either personally meaningful or artistically timeless. Both of these are subjective, of course, and many will probably disagree with my judgment on the latter. Either way, here are some highlights from my growing collection.
My favorite one is “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind, which I feel perfectly captures the simultaneous optimism and cynicism of the 1990s. It meets what I call the ‘Voyager Test’: A song I could provide to a future generation or alien species that epitomizes an era of American culture. Bonus points if the cover includes a KMart sticker.

Picked up this crisp sealed vinyl copy of Public Enemy’s 1994 single “Give It Up”. Surprisingly, this song is Public Enemy’s highest-charting single on the Billboard 100, peaking at #33 in August 1994.
This is my favorite kind of sealed wax 😁

Shown here is my growing collection of Public Enemy singles and promos.

I listen to many genres of music and while I’m generally knowledgeable about hiphop, I’m most familiar with rap released from the day I entered middle school to the time I stopped going to bars/clubs (so about 1998-2013). The only old-school hiphop I know well is NWA and its associated West Coast OG acts.

That changed a few months ago when I stumbled across the music video for Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” on YouTube. I’ve known about Public Enemy for years thanks to playing hundreds of hours of Tony Hawk 2, but I never sought out Public Enemy music so their catalogue never crossed my horizon. I was immediately amazed by the sampling, lyrics, and overall ingenuity of “Fight the Power”. It felt transcendent of time, as if simultaneously vintage and futuristic.

That started me down a Public Enemy rabbit hole. Although only a handful of songs speak to me, I regard the ones that do (“Fight the Power”, “Hazy Shade of Criminal”, “Welcome to the Terrordome”, “By the Time I Get to Arizona”, “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”) as musical masterpieces. I set out buying any singles and promos of these songs that I could find, keeping a special focus on buying sealed examples. I feel that singles celebrate a landmark achievement and deserve to stand on their own; plus, singles and promos are significantly more rare than albums.

Yeah boyeeee!