Yo! Bum Rush the Show

Public Enemy's debut cover is a dark, close group photograph shot by Glen E. Friedman in a basement studio. Chuck D says it was taken "downstairs in Eric Sadler's studio" at 510 South Franklin in Hempstead, Long Island, the group's home base. The sleeve credits the cover concept to Carl Ryder, Chuck D's pseudonym, and Friedman together, with art direction by the graffiti artist and designer Eric Haze, who also cleaned up the logo Chuck had drawn himself.

The image started on paper. "It actually came off of a drawing that I drew," Chuck D recalled, and Friedman set the scene up from his sketch. The group wanted the photograph to feel like a war room, with the crew "conjuring a plan and looking at blueprints." Chuck's instruction was blunt: "This is dead serious." Of everyone in the frame, he said, Flavor Flav "probably got the most menacing looking period on that cover." The group picked the final frame together from a proof sheet. The back cover was shot at a Hempstead McDonald's that no longer exists.

The cover announced a different kind of rap group: organised, political and unsmiling, a long way from the party imagery of earlier rap sleeves. Friedman went on to shoot more for the group, and the Haze logo became part of its identity. The album was released on 10 February 1987.