There’s only one copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s secret 2015 album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. The rap group’s seventh studio project is also touted as the world’s most valuable album as “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli initially purchased it for $2 million in an auction.
Despite raking in that amount of cash, bandmember Method Man in an interview with Vanity Fair revealed that he and his group mates don’t really talk about the album because it’s an “uncomfortable subject.”
“I don’t know. I thought it was some circus spectacle. I never really spoke to RZA about it; it’s an uncomfortable subject to most of the guys, so we don’t really discuss it too much,” the 53-year-old rapper and actor said.
RELATED STORIES
“The process of the thing being made was never told to us. We were never told what it was. It was never supposed to be a Wu-Tang album,” he explained. “We were never told what it was. It was never supposed to be a Wu-Tang album. We were recording and being paid to do a certain amount of records by a guy whose name I don’t want to mention.”
He added: “He took all these verses—some of them were old verses—and put them altogether into a compilation of Wu-Tang songs and marketed it as a Wu-Tang album, and a single copy of a Wu-Tang album. We all had a problem with it because that’s not how it was described to us.”
In 2017, a bid of $1 million was made for the album after Shkreli attempted to sell it on eBay, Variety reported. But following his conviction of securities fraud, that sale was blocked by U.S. authorities. The album was ultimately seized by the government and auctioned off to PleasrDAO for $4.75 million in 2021.
But PleasrDAO, which is an art collective, sued Shkreli last June, alleging that he had copies of the album and was making it available to the public after the company purchased it. The art collective also alleged that Shkreli boasted about playing the album on YouTube and giving other people copies of the project. A Brooklyn judge ultimately ordered Shkreli to stop streaming or sharing copies of the album.
That temporary ban was issued to Shkreli two days after PleasrDAO filed the lawsuit.
