What’s stopping music from being treated like high art? We see paintings and sculptures as grand forms of expression. Musicians are artists too, so why not treat an album like a special piece of art? In the age of streaming, music is treated as more disposable than ever. For a monthly fee, you can have seemingly every album that has ever existed instead of paying for an album. In 2014, the Wu-Tang Clan were fed up with it.
Consequently, they created their seventh studio album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. They only made one copy of the album before deleting all the master files in order to prevent it from getting leaked. Their goal was to treat their work like the Mona Lisa.
“The music industry is in crisis,” Wu-Tang Clan said in a statement. “The intrinsic value of music has been reduced to zero. Contemporary art is worth millions by virtue of its exclusivity … By adopting a 400 year old Renaissance-style approach to music, offering it as a commissioned commodity and allowing it to take a similar trajectory from creation to exhibition to sale … we hope to inspire and intensify urgent debates about the future of music.”
Wu-Tang Clan Sell Their Highly Coveted album That Few People Have Actually Heard
In 2015, the Wu eventually let a select handful of people actually hear Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. 150 art collectors, dealers, and critics settled in Queens, New York, to hear “rich, layered, and sonically bombastic” music, according to Complex. All recorders and phones were stripped as they heard 13 minutes of the album before they placed it for auction.
Then, Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli scooped up the Wu-Tang Clan album for $2 million. In January 2016, he told Noisey that he frequently pondered “wanting to destroy the record and dreaming of installing it in some remote place so that people have to make a spiritual quest to listen.” “I’m not just the heel of the music world. I want to be the world’s heel,” Shkreli said ominously.
By 2017, he nearly sold Once Upon a Time in Shaolin for over $1 million before he was arrested on unrelated fraud charges. Naturally, the Wu-Tang Clan were upset that Martin Shkreli attempted to pawn it off, with RZA attempting to buy it back himself. However, contractual limitations prevented him from ever owning the group’s album again.
By 2018, the CEO was in prison, and a federal court seized his ownership of the album. Then, PleasrDAO, a company that buys NFTs, acquired the album. They revealed that they could only play Once Upon a Time in Shaolin at listening parties and art exhibitions. So far, no one has heard the album in its entirety. In 2024, fans at a museum in Tasmania heard 30 minutes of the album after relinquishing all recording devices.
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