On a Saturday night in June, I found myself on one of the Lower East Side streets where Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring used to throw up their work for free, in the subway stations and on the sides of buildings in the late ‘70s. I was on Norfolk, just below Houston, in a synagogue listening to a sampling of the now $6 million sole existing physical copy of the almost a decade old Wu-Tang Clan album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Since its reveal in 2015, the album has been a lightning rod, provoking an array of responses from the public, and within the Clan itself, over how the album was recorded, where it ended up, and who it should belong to. The Once Upon a Time in Shaolin project both addresses and anticipates many of the issues that would befall the recorded music industry, and arguably the global economy. OUATIS is an ordeal, and an enterprise that confronts its audience with a deceptively difficult question: What is a rap album actually worth? Lost in all this head scratching and navel gazing is the elemental question of what the album actually sounds like. Is it a bust? A lost classic? A combination of both? I tend towards the latter. But before we get to that, let’s consider the almost 30 year journey the album took to get to me.
It begins in Tilburg, a small city in the Netherlands, in the late ‘90s, when an 18 year old Moroccan entertainment law student named Tarik Azzougarh had a Quixotic dream many of us shared at the time: he wanted to join the Wu-Tang Clan. The Clan—consisting of RZA, GZA, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, the now deceased Ol' Dirty Bastard, U-God, and Masta Killa—was coming off a flawless four years. They were birthed into New York City’s hip-hop ecosystem fully formed, a collective of nine Staten Island and Brooklyn kids from public housing with an aesthetic built on a matinee double feature of Kung Fu and Blaxploitation. Theirs was a vision of urban poverty articulated by dense, abstract rhymes composed of ghetto mysticism, pop culture references, and street raps that shouldn’t make sense but does. The RZA, their leader—who has always had a taste for brilliant and bugfucked music business experiments that innovate and redraw the lines dividing art and commerce—introduced this crew of strangers and their inscrutable lore, and immediately began executing an implausible master plan to launch them all as solo rappers on different record labels, and turn them all into stars. For the most part, the plan worked.
So Tarik, the Dutch settler, washed up on our shore, armed with little but hope and uncertainty. By his unverified telling (between podcast interviews and the strange and shaggy book about the making of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin by Cyrus Bozorgi), within a few visits, the aspiring rapper/producer, who named himself Cilvaringz, had found RZA’s mother and sister at the short lived Wu-Tang nail salon, Wu Nails, on Victory Boulevard in Staten Island. Cilvaringz used this link and tremendous, dogged persistence to become the first international Wu-Tang signee as a Clan affiliate. As his senior project in college, Cilvaringz proposed, and got to manage RZA’s first solo international tour, on which he also served as the opener. By 2008, he began working on his most ambitious and farfetched sounding project with RZA: A Wu-Tang Clan album that would be sold for millions to a single buyer for top dollar. It would take seven years, during which the nature and business of producing and consuming music would change radically.
During this time, the industry was confused, trying an array of strategies and experiments to find a viable path forward. The RZA’s dream was to use OUATIS as a kind of performance art that could remind people that a rap album, particularly a good one from a collection of generation defining artists, was a labor intensive special effort, one that talented and thoughtful people dedicate years of their lives to. That it deserves better than you throwing it on while you’re half focused on your infinite scroll, skipping around waiting for a track to catch your ear, then hastily forever dismissing it as “mid” and moving on to the next bit of stimuli.
The RZA and Cilvaringz had hoped this project might be purchased by a record label with vision, an altruistic endeavor they could underwrite as a tide to raise all boats. It would be played in museums, in concert halls. It was confined to two CDs and held in an ornate suitcase that would tour the world. For two hours, across a reported 30 songs that required seven years of work to compose, the audience would sit in contemplation of a recorded rap album and remind themselves what it means to listen. But the record labels said “no thanks,” as did whatever benevolent art collectors or high society types RZA might’ve hoped the album could’ve attracted. In retrospect, it ended up in the most predictable place, in the hands of a douchebag pharma bro with fuck you money who bought it on a lark and kept it in his apartment as a $2 million plaything. The other members of the Clan, largely left in the dark during this process, were less than enthusiastic in their response.
We all know what happened to Martin Shkreli several years after purchasing OUATIS, and if you don’t, feel free to brush up with this link. But the story becomes interesting again seven years later, in 2021, when an NFT art collective that calls itself PleasrDAO (the DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization) purchases the album “from” the Department of Justice, as part of Shkreli’s asset seizure, for $4 million or double what Shkreli paid for it.
Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was sold with tight legal restrictions around how it’s allowed to be “commercially exploited” which can’t happen for 88 years from the time of initial purchase. One of the common complaints I’d imagine most diehard Wu-Tang fans have is why it can’t just be put online to stream for free—and there are a number of cynical reasons—but the one that isn’t cynical is it goes against the wishes of the RZA, because he understood that the minute it’s available to stream, and the public has control of the album, it will no longer be special.
On Saturday, June 8th, I got to experience that album, at least partially, as RZA had intended. The Angel Orensanz Foundation building is the oldest standing synagogue left in New York City. It is also the setting where the photographer Danny Hastings shot the cover of the first Wu-Tang album, Enter the 36 Chambers. Pleasr clearly blew a bag on this three day event, parceled out in lots of 35 over the course of three days for media and influencer types, mixed in with a select few diehard fans of both the Wu-Tang Clan and cryptom before the album travels to the Museum of New and Old Art in Tasmania, where it will play for nine days.
The synagogue is comically beautiful, a Tim Burton church dramatically draped in flowing translucent fabrics that close off sections on either side of the main hall where VIPs lounge and supplies are stored. There are conversation sofas to lounge on, near the front of the room, and a few rows of chairs lined up behind the couches for the small crowd. At the front of the room is a shrine spread with dozens of flickering candles, all directing your eye to the focal point artifact at its head: The large case embossed with a Wu logo housing the double disk album that serves as an open ark, a torah in the temple. Soothing white noise of a tide coming in is piped in through a massive sound system. Fans wait in line to take pictures with the case, and enjoy branded, premix margaritas with sesame oil floats, which weren’t as gross as they might sound.
And then our phones are secured in pouches and the album begins, or I shouldn’t say that, because what we heard was the same quick cut edits that played for a room of potential buyers a decade ago at a listening event at MoMA, before the initial auction. It was 17 minutes, followed by an additional two songs played in full. The smoke machines started to fill the room with a pleasant, immersive fog and the music faded in. There were no visuals, no one spoke, some nodded their heads and tapped their feet, polite applause followed each song, but that’s it. It was different from a standard listening party because of the stakes. It’s not work we’ll all have access to in a matter of days or weeks. You’re just kind of alone with your thoughts, isolated from the spin cycle and echo chamber, interrogating the quality of the music being played. You get one shot, and that’s it.
For what it’s worth, I thought what I heard of the album was dope. There was a Redman heavy song I appreciated because I love Redman. One of the songs played in full for us was a sequel to the Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... classic “Rainy Days,” and when the souped up remix of the beat dropped I got chills. The title track is a Morriconesque epic that sounded absolutely wild in the synagogue. But “in the synagogue” is the key qualifier, and why I wouldn’t take my opinion too seriously. As word begins to leak out, beware the chattering class who will be privy to hearing something a few dozen people on earth have ever heard, which could inflate the assessment of it in their estimation. I listened to Wu-Tang’s 2014 effort, A Better Tomorrow, on my ride home, and as I biked the Manhattan Bridge with an AirPod in, I tried to imagine what it might sound like artfully edited down to its best 17 minutes, played on a John Woo stage set through a state of the art sound system. And I thought that would probably sound dope too, and suddenly I could see the point RZA was trying to make.
The least important thing about Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is the quality of the album. But if you wanted to approximate the tone and general vibes, you could listen to A Better Tomorrow, an album that garnered lukewarm response upon release. That album, produced by RZA, was made in three years, within the seven year span the Clan was working on OUATIS, in what sounds like a more coherent and intentional manner. You could also listen to Cilvaringz’s I, released in 2017. It’s a perfectly fine work of Wu-Tang cosplay and karaoke, with the sort of accomplished, replacement level RZA beats that 4th Disciple and Mathematics once populated “lesser” Wu projects with.
The quality of the album doesn’t matter because if it’s not a classic, it would only serve to bolster the proof of concept for the experiment. As a commodity, the album has never been cheaper, which has radically remapped the financial structure for how artists produce and get paid for their music. When was the last time you had A Better Tomorrow conversation? When was the last time you thought about it? The value of this album is in its scarcity, it exploits our curiosity. At a time when everything is immediately accessible to us via the nearest screen, here is one thing we can’t have. It’s a Schrödinger’s box and you want to open the box, and a decade later it continues to captivate its audience because it provokes many of the questions that haunt the music industry, and our lives and at least suggests an answer that provokes many more questions and problems: Ethical questions of access to and ownership of art—that rap has always been a populist medium and it all should remain cheap and accessible for everyone—as well as functional questions of how to continue operating an industry dissolving before our eyes.
If you’re in New York City, head to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for a few hours and walk its halls. Someday soon you may be able to hear Once Upon a Time in Shaolin there, but for now, “all” you’ll see is a respectable cross section of the entire history of art made by people from every corner of the Earth. And among these paintings, sculptures, and artifacts, you’ll see devotional paintings and sculptures, and portraits of rich white guys. Work that was groundbreaking and important in its technique, in its applied theory, but work that was commissioned by the church, or the crown, or the super wealthy gentry class.
What you won’t find are at least some Basquiats and Harings. You can find facsimiles online, but you can’t and may never again be able to experience their gale force, platonic experience, full scale in a large, blank, breathable space, hanging centered and framed on a wall. Because some are in other museums, and some are in private collections, in the living rooms and dining rooms and studies of very rich collectors around the world. The exact scenes Haring once painted on D train platforms can now sell at auction for over five million dollars. In 2017, a Basquiat sold for 110.5 million, thanks to a market set by the ancestors of the PleasrDAO guys and collectors like Jay-Z and Swizz Beatz. Or millionaires and billionaires minted by a former version of the rap industry, with different stakes, different scales, and different incentive models. It seems extreme to me. But someone was willing to pay that much for them, so I suppose that’s what they’re worth.
