Fact one:
“Wu-Tang baby gonna rock your world.”
“From the tip of the penis / to the fallopian tube.”
“Fuck soccer.”
These are some of the lyrics on the most expensive album ever sold.
Fact two:
“One of the original visions for the album was that you could treat it like a piece of art,” said de facto Wu-Tang clan leader RZA in a 2022 interview about the group’s unreleased album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. “That it would travel its route though museums or special locations that you could come in [and listen to it]. You can’t get it at home, can’t get it on your phone, you can’t get it on your TV set. If you really want this you gotta go to the location and experience it. And then go home and talk about it, think about it and remember what you saw, seen and heard.”
Fact three:
“I just did my recordings, handed them in and that was all I had to do with it,” Wu-Tang founding member Ghostface Killah told The Guardian earlier this month. “I didn’t see no money from it. I never really heard the album, either. I don’t got nothin’ to do with that album. Zero!’’
More facts:
The 31-track album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, by legendary Staten Island hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, was recorded in secret by RZA and Dutch producer Cilvaringz over a six-year period. It features all surviving nine members of Wu-Tang Clan. Not all of them are happy about it.
There’s only one version of the album – a two-CD set, housed in an ornate case with an accompanying leather-bound book. Completed in 2014, it was bought from the group in 2015 by Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, for US$2 million. Soon after, Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud, and when the US Department of Justice seized his assets in 2017, chief among them was the album.
In mid-2021, NFT collective Pleasr DAO bought the album at auction for US$4 million ($6 million). Along with the notoriety of owning the world’s most expensive pair of CDs, Pleasr DAO inherited the legal agreement stipulating Once Upon a Time in Shaolin can’t be “commercially exploited” until 2103. This means it can only be played at private listening parties or given away for free. At this point, no one is going to do that.
Besides, what did it sound like? Outside of RZA, Cilvaringz, Martin Shkreli and whispers on the internet, no one knew. Did it matter? Yes. Because when no one knows what a rare and expensive record sounds like, its value will continue to increase.
All great albums have a story behind the music. The legend of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is all story. Now in 2024, a decade after it was made, that story is starting to shift.
In early June, Pleasr DAO held a three-day listening party at a synagogue in New York, which – according to a thoughtful Complex article about the event – saw bursts of “17 minutes, followed by an additional two songs played in full” for media, influencers and crypto crew. Evidently seeing his Google alerts and cracking his knuckles, Shkreli then livestreamed sections of the album on X (formerly Twitter), implying he’d illegally copied the album. Cue Pleasr DAO launching a lawsuit against Shkreli, while also beginning to sell partial ownership of the album as an NFT.
All this is exhausting to keep up with. But for the Museum of Old and New Art – the first museum in the world to host an official listening party – it’s excellent promo.
“No recording devices,” says a Mona staff member to the few dozen media and ballot-winning fans on a recent Saturday afternoon outside Mona in Tasmania. We have gathered here in the bracing cold to be some of the first in the world to officially hear Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
That’s because the album is in the building as part of the Hobart museum’s excellent Namedropping exhibition, which is all about status – who has it, how you get it, why we care and how it changes our behaviour. Inside Mona, it’s clear the effect our proximity to Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is having on our behaviour: we’re frisked, two security guards wave over us with metal detectors, and we file quietly inside Mona’s resident recording facility, Frying Pan Studios.
Roomy chairs and beanbags face a small round yellow table. On it sits an original Playstation (apparently the best console to play CDs on), complete with a black W-shaped controller with yellow buttons. Covering the window to the studio is a black and yellow striped decal, the group’s signature colours, blocking out the world. It’s theatre in here, the show about to start. Staff members wearing Wu-Tang tees (front: cash rules everything around me; back: peace is the absence of confusion) busy themselves in the control room.
Finally an attendant walks to the front. “This album is a statement about the value of artist's work,” he says. We’re told we’ll be hearing a 30-minute Tasmanian Chamber Mix, specially put together for us by producer Cilvaringz. Our attendant holds the controller aloft. “You ready?”
With a flick of the button comes rain sounds. Thunder. And the weight of expectation beginning to deflate. Ominous strings give way to a huge bass kick thundering in and the voice of Inspectah Deck. Two fans in Wu-Tang tees down the front on beanbags start nodding their heads furiously. With whining horns, bells, dusty orchestral samples and orchestra hits, it sounds like classic, hard-knocking Wu-Tang.
Listening to music that can’t be repeated induces a kind of panic. Especially in the digital age, which trains us to remember nothing. As a music writer I’m used to cross-referencing tracks, poring over lyrics and credits, having time to repeat, absorb and process. Today I have a pencil, pad of paper and the odd sense I can’t write fast enough or listen slow enough.
Track two is a skit of gun blasts and bluster; track three opens with “induction then instruction” yelled three times, before a gruff voice asks “Who wants to die?” Me, if I can’t get this down.
Track four riffs on a melancholy flip of Raekwon’s cut Rainy Dayz from his 1995 solo LP Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and features Redman’s husky flow and the first appearance by Cher – yes, that Cher – crooning “It’s a mystery inside / of how I’m going to get mine” and “I will love you so much / that my heart gets none”.
It goes on like this, me caught between enjoying and analysing this thing slipping away. I’m trying to scrutinise where a sample’s been lifted from, or who’s rapping what, but my brain gets distracted by being in the orbit of the object on the table. To the history that put it there. And my upgrade in status by merely being in its presence.
Track five sticks an awesome rolling bassline to a swaggering, loping beat, alongside whirring synths and a heartfelt: “Father hardly talks anymore / we go a little farther each day.” From here the production takes a dip – a short, heavy beat and barking dogs, a passing mention of Tina Turner, then a cool, slow, locked groove that loops on a guitar chime.
Snatches of lyrics flick by: “We been doing since ’93”; “I meat-tenderise MCs to death”; “My supreme talent is to restore balance from the opening line”; what sounds like Raekwon alternating between the profound (“and the hurt still hurts / I don’t want to game”) and the perverse (“from the tip of the penis / to the fallopian tube”).
The vibe dips again, with a cheesy skit between a guy and girl on the phone talking about having a stash and doing a deal. It’s followed by a memorably specific insult, “Fuck football, fuck soccer / just give me the gun”, and someone saying “Cilvaringz you did it again / you did it again”.
Our half-hour winds down on a track featuring a rotating cast of the expanded Wu-Tang universe. Film dialogue (“very good swordplay”) kicks off a wobbly beat, capped with a brass stab that reminded me of the theme song from the old Batman TV show. A bluesy guitar solo arrives, and then female voices sing “I really love that Wu-Tang Clan / give me a little bit of that Wu-Tang Clan”, like it’s wedding band time at the Hard Rock Cafe. It kinda stinks. It goes on: “Yessir Cilvaringz on the cut / go Ringz, go Ringz, go Ringz”. Then Cher returns to boom “Wu-Tang baby gonna rock your world” a couple of times.
Are they? Today was fun. But an uneven 30-minute mix of a double album won’t do it. What will do it is the fact we’ve reverently listened to a 10-year-old album on the exact furthest spot on earth away from Staten Island, New York. (Well technically Augusta, Western Australia, is – but Hobart is only 2936km away.) Just like RZA wanted.
Is it any good? Final fact: until you hear it, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is timeless.
The writer travelled to Hobart with assistance from Mona.
