Saw an auction for a sealed graded cassette copy of Public Enemy’s 1990 album “Fear of a Black Planet”. Music grading is very new and both the concept of grading and the company that graded this, Rewind Grading, might end up being a home run or a bust. Who knows. All I know is when I was thumbing my nose at cassette tapes in Sam Goody two decades ago, I never would’ve thought I’d drop a C-note on one someday.

I posted a couple months ago about my recent ‘discovery’ of hiphop group Public Enemy. At this point I have 15 vinyl singles, 5 vinyl albums, a handful of CDs/cassettes and 3 sealed live VHS tapes. I try to only collect sealed or promo copies because those are much more rare than open/regular copies. My crown jewel so far is a good condition vinyl promo of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest hiphop albums ever.

I’ve picked up pretty much every album/song I’ve wanted so at this point I’m focusing purely on sealed and promo copies. Not sure when I’ll consider my collection complete, but that’s the fun of collecting. The ironic part about it? I don’t own anything that can play vinyl records, CDs, cassettes, or VHS.

A few weeks ago I posted my growing collection of vintage Public Enemy singles and demos. I was watching an interview of PE frontman Chuck D recently and he mentioned that he went to Adelphi University and graduated with a degree in Fine Arts. I went online, found a PDF version of the 1984 Adelphi yearbook, and sure enough, there’s Carlton Douglas Ridenhour. I went on eBay and found someone selling an original copy of the yearbook so I nabbed it.

I’m not huge into yearbooks as a collectible because practically every celebrity has a yearbook, but I had to own this one because it represents an important connection to Chuck D’s body of work:

* While most musicians have graduated high school, not many have a college degree. A common theme of Chuck D’s lyrics is self-empowerment with an emphasis on education as a key to success.
* Chuck D said of his time at Adelphi that it was “the foundation of [his] social, political, and musical world”, an impressive statement given the socially-conscious nature of his music.
* He hosted a hip-hop show on Adelphi’s student radio station, WBAU, through which he met another Adelphi student named William Drayton Jr, better known as the other half of Public Enemy, “Flavor Flav”.
Do any of y’all own a celebrity yearbook?

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!