Highlights from My Vinyl Collection, Part 5

This is the fifth installment of "Highlights from My Vinyl Collection," an appreciation of great music, not necessarily rare finds or expensive imports. This is not about "deleted Smiths singles and original, not rereleased - underlined - Frank Zappa albums," as Rob Gordon so eloquently put it, though a small select gems might appear every now and again.



Public Enemy - Yo! Bum Rush the Show

Public Enemy's debut album wasn't my first experience with hip-hop, not by far. It is, however, what I would consider my first introduction to what I would consider one of the premier albums from one of the premier hip-hop groups ever to grace wax. Vinyl is how hip-hop was born, so it seems more than appropriate to obtain the masters of hip-hop on that medium. Yo! Bum Rush the Show is one of those albums in which the purchase of it is forever lodged in my memory. I was on a college tour. The town was Chico, California. It was an unforgivable hellhole. Yet, I will forever cherish my time there because I was able to buy this album in a record store there. At that point, vinyl was already outdated. CDs hadn't quite made the scene, but cassettes were the wave of the present. They had a very short future, as it turned out, but I opted for vinyl. Of course, we still had a week to go on the trip and I had to figure out how to keep it safe. Luckily, it is still in my collection, the iconic debut of a force to be reckoned with in the genre. Chuck D and Flavor Flav proved to me to be immediately recognizable as the most dynamic duo in hip-hop. Chuck D was powerful, political, and inspiring. Flav was exciting, madcap, and ebullient. Together, they complemented each other in ways that were unimaginable to that point. To come out of the gate with a song called "You're Gonna Get Yours" took balls, and PE had them. I don't know if I can say that my passion for social justice was spawned by Public Enemy, but they sure played their part. Everything about the album appealed to me: the album cover with its feel of an underground secret meeting, the teletype font on the cover saying "...The Government's Responsible...," the sleeve liner notes with lyrics, dense with allusions and ripe for analysis, the concepts of militancy and protest, a new perspective, and finally the songs themselves. Every track on this debut is stellar. From "Miuzi Weighs a Ton" to "Terminator X Speaks With His Hands," Public Enemy had me in their collective grasp. I'm still there.