Rare Wu-Tang Clan album to be played at exhibit in Tasmania
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The box containing the one-of-a-kind album recorded by the Wu-Tang Clan and sold at auction to hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
NEW YORK – A decade ago, American hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan issued a sole copy of a CD-only album, secured it in an engraved nickel and silver box, locked it in a vault and said it could not be heard by the public until 2103.
The move was seen as a protest against the devaluation of music in the streaming era.
But the 2015 album, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, got caught up in the very capitalistic endeavours that Wu-Tang Clan had tried to avoid, when the record was purchased by Martin Shkreli, the disgraced American pharmaceutical speculator who was convicted of fraud in 2017.
He bought the album at auction for US$2 million (S$2.7 million), only for it to be seized by the government and sold in order to pay off Shkreli’s nearly US$7.4 million debt.
As these things go, an NFT (non-fungible token) collective purchased the album for US$4 million in 2021. And soon, if you can get yourself to the island of Tasmania off the southern coast of Australia in two weeks’ time, you might be able to hear what American rapper RZA and Dutch-Moroccan record producer Cilvaringz created 79 years before it was meant to go public – or a part of it, anyway.
From June 15 to 24, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, will host a series of private listening events where visitors will be able to “experience” a selection of the 31 tracks from the group’s seventh studio album.
“You hear talk about once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,” the museum wrote on the exhibit page. “This is probably one of them.”
Free tickets, “if you are lucky enough to secure” them, the museum added, can be reserved starting May 30.
The listening sessions will be part of a larger exhibit called Namedropping, which will last until April 2025 and examine celebrity, status and culture.
Other names attached to the exhibit include Porsche, Madonna, Henry Kissinger, Air Jordan, McDonald’s and Henry VIII. The Wu-Tang Clan album will be available for listening only for those 10 days.
“Every once in a while, an object on this planet possesses mystical properties that transcend its material circumstances,” Mr Jarrod Rawlins, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs, said in a statement.
“Once Upon A Time In Shaolin is more than just an album, so when I was thinking about status, and what a transcendent name drop could be, I knew I had to get it into this exhibition.”
Mona, as the museum is known, opened in 2012, much to the chagrin of locals and the delight of tourists and curators. The US$200 million venture was the brainchild of David Walsh, a wealthy local gambler and mathematician.
Mona seemed like the perfect fit to “support RZA’s vision” for the album, collective PleasrDAO – the owners of the album – said in its statement.
The news about the album appear to have been teased for days. A video on social media shows a hand-drawn sign that reads “Do you like Wu-Tang?” on board the Staten Island Ferry and at other New York City locations as passers-by listen to snippets of the album.
The album’s title is a nod to Shaolin, which is how the Wu-Tang Clan refer to their home town of Staten Island. The nine-member music act was founded in New York in the early 1990s, and was known for hits like C.R.E.A.M. (1993) and Protect Ya Neck (1992).
As the album’s owners, PleasrDAO can listen to the 31 tracks on its two CDs, which are accompanied by a leather-bound parchment book, according to the 2021 deal.
But the original restrictions that RZA and Cilvaringz imposed on Shkreli were a part of the sale to PleasrDAO, including that the album cannot be released to the public in any form until 2103, 88 years from its initial sale in 2015.
However, at the time of purchase, PleasrDAO said that it had ambitions to make the album more available to the public through listening parties and gallery-style exhibitions.
According to the museum, the restrictions originally imposed on Shkreli include that stipulation. It was not immediately clear what proof PleasrDAO had shown to the museum that the collective and the museum had the legal right to play it.
RZA, PleasrDAO and the Mona museum did not immediately respond to requests for comment. NYTIMES
