Once Upon a Time In Shaolin
An album wrapped in a mystery inside a McGuffin: thoughts on Wu-Tang's controversial "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin," from the co-author of "The Tao of Wu" and "The Wu-Tang Manual"
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As you may have noticed, that beloved American institution the Wu-Tang Clan rose up from the depths into your daily newsfeed. As the Times reported Thursday, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the last known album by the group, has added one more confounding chapter to its Walter Benjamin-meets-Garcia Marquez story — a story of art, commerce, and vision that I happened to observe directly, and that gets stranger with every turn.
The latest is that this mystery shrouded single-copy album — a Banksy-esque conceptual masterstroke and real-life McGuffin I actually helped launch ten years ago — can finally be heard by normal paying fans. Though only in a convoluted hoodwink of a commercial offering that’s almost worthy of this very Wu-Tang chapter.
Since I co-authored two bestselling books with RZA — with whom I spent many days in tour buses, hotel rooms, and various pungent lairs (plus untold hours immersed in the Wu’s Daedalian rhymes and Byzantine visions) — I thought I’d help put this latest chapter into context. And maybe even prompt a minor reappraisal of the Wu-Tang Clan itself: a mysterious shape-shifting art-making entity whose most gnomic utterances — like, “Wu-Tang is for the children” — have an odd habit of turning prophetic.
To get us up to date, the latest installment goes as follows: In 2015, the most expensive album of all time, the single-copy Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, sold for $2 million to a buyer who was legally prohibited from duplicating or sharing the album, a buyer soon revealed to be tabloid monster Martin Shkreli, whose subsequent reversals of fortune eventually landed the album in the hands of "online art collective" Pleasr, who announced their decision to "bring the music to the people" in an "an artistic experiment” that would charge people $1 (plus fees) to access to an encrypted digital version of a 5-minute album sampler.
Which I’m guessing sounds a lot like: pffffffffft.
That is, of course, the sound of anticlimax, which I’m not at all convinced is unintentional in this case. In fact, this kind of buggy-sounding, hyper-attenuated portal sounds so unsatisfying it’s practically designed to amplify this album’s aura, that lost quality of a singular art work that Benjamin defined as its “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” — something no recorded album has had until now.
Because even in 2024, there actually is a single copy of Once Upon A Time in Shaolin somewhere — most recently in Australia, at Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art, which closed its waiting list for attendees at 5,000 people. And who knows where this hip-hop version of the 1970’s touring King Tut exhibit may stop next.
That really does feel like a relevant comparison here. For the past ten years, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin — as sign, signifier, referent, and concrete object — has bobbed along various cultural strata like the Maltese Falcon or Lebowski's rug, the obscurely radiant center to an intrigue of art, commerce, hype, hip-hop, drugs, sleaze, crypto shenanigans, and all manner of early-00s skullduggery. Much of this is apparently covered in Cilvaringz associate Cyrus Bozorgmehr’s book titled (ahem) Once Upon a Time in Shaolin: The Untold Story of Wu-Tang Clan's Million-Dollar Secret Album, the Devaluation of Music, and America's New Public Enemy No. 1.
But as I said, I did observe parts of this story pretty closely myself, so I'll try to summarize it below without sounding too insane.
Ten years ago, Staten Island’s generationally-defining hip-hop collective the Wu-Tang Clan pressed a single copy of its seventh album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which they'd recorded in secret over the previous six years, and deposited in a vault in Marrakech, Morocco. (Yes, a vault in Morocco.)
In a plan conceived and primarily executed by Wu mastermind RZA and his Morocco-based protege Cilvaringz, who'd handled much of the album's production, Once Upon a Time would not be mechanically reproduced. Rather, unlike all commercial recordings of the past 100 years, this 2-CD album would exist as a single objet d'art to be auctioned to the highest bidder, who would in turn be contractually forbidden to reproduce, sell, or distribute the album for another 88 years. (Yes, 88 years.)
A heady and discernibly Wu-ish brew of obfuscation, provocation, exploitation, and next-level gamesmanship, Once Upon a Time was said to have reunited the surviving members of the Clan, enlisted the Wu Tang Killa Beez and Redman, and betrayed a vaguely Euro provenance with reported guest spots by footballers from FC Barcelona, Game of Thrones actress Carice "Melisandre" van Houten, and, er, Cher. (Yes, Cher.)
Was it banging? Probably. I think so. But music only comprised about a third of the work's meaning, layered as it was with theory and commentary about the devaluation of art in the age of digital monetization and ensconced as it was in rumor, mystery, and the Wu's usual range of mass-culture associations. And in the ten years since it emerged, its value has dramatically increased and Wu-Tang’s meaning has subtly shifted.
To help literalize the work's singularity, RZA et. al. commissioned British-Moroccan artist Yahye to produce a weighty, luxuriously engraved case of silver and mahogany to house the two CDs like sacred scrolls, an object equally suggestive — and appropriately — of both the Ark of the Covenant and the Lament Configuration from Clive Barker's Hellraiser.
In 2015, Wu-Tang moved to sell this work through the online auction house Paddle8, which had already sold works by Jeff Koons, Julian Schnabel, Damien Hirst, and others (and for whom I wrote original material used in the sale). Its story was also covered vividly and amusingly by Forbes, to whom RZA said of the unique artwork: "This is like someone having the scepter of an Egyptian king."
That image probably should have clued us in as to what type of person would actually buy this thing, but I still reeled at the news of who did.
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At 32, former hedge-fund douche Martin Shkreli already had a lock on Villain of the Year before bragging about buying Once Upon A Time for $2 million, having gained infamy for jacking up the price of an AIDS drug his company had acquired from $13.50 a pill to $750.
The sobriquet "pharma-bro" feels way too flattering for the dweeby, delicate-featured media-chaser with the Trumpian shame deficit, whose music interest seems rather less than abiding, and who Ghostface speaks for many in publicly declaring a shithead. If nothing else, his presence shifted the genre of the Once Upon a Time in Shaolin saga from globe-trotting noir to daytime TV.
After the purchase, Shkreli proceeded to brag about it, taunt Wu Tang members, threaten to violate its contract's terms, and generally undermine the work's whole air of celebratory mystery — and was just barred by a judge from streaming the album he now says he, surprise-surprise, copied.
Among the many bizarre tendrils this person contributed to this story is the fact that, while in prison for securities fraud and conspiracy, he somehow roused the tender feelings of the Bloomberg News reporter assigned to cover his story, who then left her husband to pursue a relationship with him, and who engages in a book-length inquiry of their whole romance. (Sample j'accuse: "And might we reasonably long for not only that stranger’s attention, but also some of his boldness, his ability to take up space, and his ability to disrupt by merely asserting his presence?" Hey, who among us.)
Anyway, once he was imprisoned and fined millions of dollars, Shkreli had to surrender the album to the U.S. government, who, in July of 2021, auctioned it to another buyer. Or rather, buyers. Or "online art collective.” In any case, to an entity that once again nudges our story’s genre — this time from daytime TV to speculative-fiction or corporate satire.
Pleasr aka PleasrDAO — the DAO, (not to be confused with Tao) standing for Decentralized Autonomous Organization — has the orthography, tech-speak, and inscrutable website of a state-of-the-art crypto con. But its members seem to consider themselves kindred spirits to the outlaw artists from Shaolin, NYC.
"This album at its inception was a kind of protest against rent-seeking middlemen, people who are taking a cut away from the artist," Pleasr's Jamis Johnson told the NYT. “Crypto very much shares that same ethos.” NYT’s Ben Sisario nails his typographical sketch in the next line: “'The album itself is kind of the O.G. NFT,' said Mr. Johnson, 34, who was proudly sporting a Wu-Tang T-shirt."
So not pharma- but crypto-bro.
The Pleasr guys don't sound like bad people necessarily. Just not the most auspicious custodians of the artwork some of us saw released into the world a decade ago.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, you’ll recall, are digital objects created using blockchain code to stamp their provenance into the object, thus far enabling people to prove the absolute uniqueness of worthless or regrettable works of "art."
Prior to Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, Pleasr's signature acquisition was an NFT of the original "Doge" meme, which sounds like an actual "OG NFT,” with all the faint praise that implies. For Doge enthusiasts, Pleasr used the platform Fractional.art to let participants pay "less than a dollar" for the inscrutable pleasure of telling someone that they own a fraction of a representation of an image of a dumb 2013 meme turned crypto scam.
Now, they’re giving Wu-Tang fans a similar offer, letting them pay slightly more than one a dollar to sit at home and enjoy the elusive charms of infinitesimal ownership of something they never really experience.
Pleasr's Johnson more or less acknowledged this when he told Rolling Stone, “It’s very much as if the Louvre decided to fractionalize the Mona Lisa and distribute a portion of it for the public to own" — which is apparently meant to sound meaningful, or somehow appealing.
In any case, nominal part-ownership of a weightless digital phantasm is far indeed from the experience conjured back at the original unveiling of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, in 2015. And maybe more to the point, it’s far from what one any Wu-Tang fan can likely conjure with her own imagination.
So I’ll close with my impressions from that original opening, of which I hear echoes in this account of a recent listening session in Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art. I wrote it just after that strange NYC night in 2015, when we faithful came to the MoMA outpost PS1 to listen and dream.
April 1, 2015
Word on the queue was that the artists had requested “some Game of Thrones motherfuckers” for security, which felt about right for the dark, below-freezing night in Queens. Outside, a guard announced that we’d have to surrender, “all [our] digital items,” after which we were allowed inside, then directed back out into the freezing courtyard, where PS1’s white geodesic Performance Dome felt, inescapably, like an igloo.
Inside the dim-lit dome, the slim, Euro-chic silhouettes of art-world figures mingled with bulky shapes of hip-hoppers in bubblegoose, all quickly filling rows of chairs arranged around a central dais. The platform was lit from overhead, surrounded by ropes, and flanked by two guards who did look beefy but unlikely to impale. (Note to management: the UNIQLO-designed blazers are dope but hard to rock like a Dothraki.)
But there in the center of everything, it stood: an ornately-wrought, Moroccan-made, Ark-of-the-Covenant-looking cuboid, which may have held Moses’ tablets, Aaron’s rod, and/or the latest Wu-Tang album. This was, per MoMA’s curator, “the first, the last, the only public-listening session” of the Wu Tang’s seventh album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. I guess it sounds ferocious from the 13 minutes that soon blasted inside that dome, but I have to say, those guys had me at the words “one copy.”
After the music played, RZA and his pupil-turned-producer Cilvaringz came out for a Q&A led by New Yorker-turned-Genius.com-staffer (and therefore GZA relation?) Sasha Frere-Jones. S/FJ jovially poked them about the ironies and contradictions surrounding the auction of a Wu Tang album to someone whose disposable $5 million-plus suggests an attenuated relationship to the fan base. A buyer some see as the biggest-pimping scalper in history.
But nearly everything about this comparison comes from a millennial hip-hop world that’s fundamentally different from the one that formed the Wu. Jay-Z, Kanye, Diddy, or whoever else can “run hip-hop” all they want, but none of them could have or would have created Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
This work takes the industry’s century-old business model — sell the most copies for lowest price per unit, today valuing a song equal to a box of paperclips — and, yes, flips it. This Shaolin model sells the fewest possible copies (one) for the highest possible price (TBA), which alone puts this rap group into conversation with Banksy, Warhol, Duchamp, Brian Eno, and anyone who altered our basic understanding of art’s place in the modern world.
Onstage taking questions, RZA and Cilvaringz seemed impervious to all criticisms about this work, partially by virtue of their charm, but also by the depth of thought they’d clearly given the subject, and their transparency about internal struggles it provoked.
The commitment and ingenuity they brought to executing Once Upon A Time In Shaolin make it much more powerful than mere provocation.
After working on it for nearly a decade, personally mastering the album before giving the plant’s engineers the night off so no one else could hear it, Cilvaringz handed over the mastered disc and destroyed the only copy he had of his life’s work, which he doesn’t expect to ever hear again.
At one point during the talk, Cilvaringz corrected himself after referencing the glittering monolith. “I’m not saying it’s actually in there,” he said pointing to the box presumably containing the finished album, which he revealed was then still in Morocco.
After they finished, I walked around the shadowy ovoid space and chatted with some Wu-related friends I’d not seen in years. One said she was opposed to the album’s music being hidden, that she hoped some philanthropist would buy the album and let the people hear it — Wu-Tang, after all, being for the children.
I can’t argue with that. I can’t argue against it. I didn’t make the album. I still don’t really know what it sounds like.
On its website, Rolling Stone said that “if the full, 128-minute Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is as solid as the 13 minutes heard Monday night, it could be the group’s most popular album since 1997,” that it “hearkened back to the RZA’s glory days between the 1993 debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and 1997’s double-disc follow-up Wu-Tang Forever [when] he helmed…GZA’s Liquid Swords and Ghostface Killah’s Ironman, that have come to be regarded as one of hip-hop’s greatest creative streaks.”
That’s quite a precise block of verbiage to extrapolate from the 13 minutes of audio jump-cuts I heard. And while the reporter covers themselves with that hedging “if,” I wonder if that “if” isn’t the most salient word in the whole review. A word that gestures toward the imaginal realm a work like this creates.
The last song on the Talking Heads album Remain In Light was an homage to Joy Division, whose music no Talking Head had actually heard. Instead, they composed and recorded the song “The Overload” based on impressions they’d gotten from reading articles about Joy Division. Now, that song sounds nothing like Joy Division, but it’s one of the most killer closing acts of any album ever. Think of Coleridge’s “creative misreading” of Kant founding the American school of Transcendentalism.
A few years ago, I talked to Beck about his 11th album, Song Reader, which by some metrics still doesn’t exist. Song Reader contained 20 original new songs, all imaginatively composed and often hilariously annotated, and released solely as sheet music by McSweeney’s. You had to learn and play each song to hear it. The Reader was a book, objet d’art, and map to a unique, ethereal experience, one once common and now nearly extinct.
Beck said the idea came from remembering how excited he used to get when he’d have to take two buses across L.A. to a record store to buy a Sonic Youth album he’d awaited for months, and the sounds he imagined hearing in an album he knew he’d live with for a month to come.
In Four Seasons in Rome, a memoir of early parenthood, the novelist Anthony Doerr gets sucked into Pliny the Elder’s expansive, fantastical, often bananas Natural History, circa 79 A.D., a work that resembles, in many ways, the extended universe that nine kids dreamed up in the Stapleton and Park Hill projects of Staten Island in the late-1980s.
Eventually Doerr realizes he’s not reading this work of mad extrapolation and hilariously off-base science to “see how far humanity has come but to see how much we’ve lost.” He notes that his toddler sons see more images in a day than Pliny the Elder saw in a lifetime and worries that their generation will have to work harder than every previous one to stay alert to this world’s miracles.
I thought about this on the concrete path outside PS1, about staying alert to miracles. I thought about it when I jumped onto the Manhattan-bound 7 from PS1, when a Tom Waits lyric came to mind, from “Innocent When You Dream”: “Just like before the band starts to play/They always play your favorite tune.”
I wonder if works like Beck’s Reader or even Once Upon a Time in Shaolin aren’t about that moment. The moment just before the band starts to play, before the needle drops, as the lights first dim but the show has not yet started. That split-second in which we all become composers, directors, producers, DJs.
To me, that’s an experience worth giving everyone, even if they never hear what’s actually a beat of whatever’s in that vault. That moment — which may last a lifetime — when you can only imagine how it might actually sound.