Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’ Played In Tasmania
The solely current copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, one of many best collector’s gadgets in recorded music historical past, will lastly get its public debut.
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There is a catch: you’ll have to go to Tasmania subsequent month to listen to it.
The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, the capital of the Apple Isle, has loaned the one-off file for its upcoming exhibition, Namedropping.
Mona’s Frying Pan Studios will host 30-minute listening events twice-a-day from June 15-24, the place a curated choice of tracks from the album can be performed.
“During Namedropping,” reads a assertion, “the world’s only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s fabled seventh studio album will be on display in the museum. We’re giving you the chance to hear it, too. At least some of it.”
Tickets are free – if you’re fortunate sufficient to safe a ticket, the museum handily warns – and obtainable just for over-18s.
“You hear talk about once-in-a-lifetime opportunities: this is probably one of them,” reads a assertion.
The temporary historical past of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is so uncommon, it’s worthy of its personal function movie.
The hip-hop pioneers introduced the key, one-of-a-kind urgent in 2015, a rebuff to the digital world in which we now stay. And put the file beneath the hammer.
“When you buy a painting or a sculpture, you’re buying that piece rather than the right to replicate it,” says RZA in a Q&A on the net public sale web site. “Owning a Picasso doesn’t mean you can sell prints or reproductions, but that you’re the sole owner of a unique original. And that’s what Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is. It’s a unique original rather than a master copy of an album.” The Clan delivered the coup de grâce on the venture by deleting all digital recordsdata.
The successful bidder was Martin Shkreli, the infamous so-called “pharma bro” who went on a headline-dominating rampage when he each hiked up costs of the HIV/AIDS drug Daraprim and bought the unreleased double-disc for a cool $2 million.
He continued to seize headlines when promised to share the album publicly, however provided that Donald Trump was elected as president. That occurred, and Shkreli shared a small collection of movies, all of which featured him with snippets of the album taking part in in the background – regardless of being beneath orders from the Clan to not play the album for 88 years.
Shkreli tried to promote the album on eBay, chastened by the backlash he’d acquired from a member of the Clan and the music world. The sale didn’t undergo and, in 2018, following Shkreli’s conviction for securities fraud, he was pressured to half methods with the album beneath a federal court-ordered seizure of belongings.
In 2021 the US Department of Justice reportedly bought the album for $4 million to digital artwork collective PleasrDAO, its present proprietor.
