No commercial release was allowed for 88 years, you couldn’t record or remix the original, play it at a large party, pop it on a streaming service or livestream it the only way to listen would be to know the owner and get invited to a small, tightly controlled event. At a time when almost all music was instantly available for free, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was going to be nearly impossible to hear. A quick history: A Wu-Tang obsessive named Tarik “Cilvaringz” Azzougarh gradually works his way into the periphery of the famous Nineties hip-hop group and hits on the idea of recording a single copy of an album and limiting its uses. Spilling so much ink on an album no one has heard, owned exclusively by people you’ll never meet, seems perverse.īut the saga continues. The twists and turns of this release have been obsessively chronicled in the media over the past few years younger listeners may only know the Wu-Tang Clan as that group who sold a one-copy album to the guy who jacked up prices on an AIDS drug. Jamis Johnson with the outer case for ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’ at an undisclosed location in New York, October 2021. We want fans to participate in this album at some level.” (That’s a real title.) By purchasing the album, Johnson tells Rolling Stone, “We want this to be us bringing this back to the people. “This beautiful piece of art, this ultimate protest against middlemen and rent seekers of musicians and artists, went south by going into the hands of Martin Shkreli, the ultimate internet villain,” says Jamis Johnson, PleasrDAO’s 34-year-old Chief Pleasing Officer. This means the buyer of the album will be memorialized in the blockchain-verse. What was a resolutely physical product - the album comes in an ornate silver box accompanied by a leather-bound booklet - has sprouted a digital component: an NFT deed of ownership. (Nadya from Pussy Riot is now a PleasrDAO member.)Īs Once Upon a Time in Shaolin got a new owner, it also gained a new layer of complexity. government before making its way to PleasrDAO, a group with a passion for buying digital collectibles honoring “anti-establishment rebels” - their previous purchases include NFTs connected to Edward Snowden and the Russian band Pussy Riot. Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was subsequently seized by the U.S. The buyer back then was Martin Shkreli, a hedge-fund and pharmaceutical executive who was quickly becoming one of the most reviled men in America. Wu-Tang auctioned off the album, which was both lambasted as an elitist stunt-art hoax and embraced as a shrewd protest against digitization’s erosion of music’s value, for $2 million in 2015. On Wednesday, a group called PleasrDAO revealed that it was ultimately behind the purchase, which cost the collective $4 million. Marshals is just the latest odd episode in the life of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which was bought by an anonymous entity in July. “As you can imagine, the tracks have a lot of colorful language on them, there’s a lot of giggling people who are not hip-hop people listening to this stuff,” Scoolidge says. attorney’s office, and the Department of Justice. Scoolidge had bought a Discman for the occasion, and he popped in the album under the watchful eyes of around 10 members of law enforcement, representatives from the U.S. The courthouse was hardly an unusual destination for the lawyer, but that day, he had a bizarre assignment: Listen to the lone existing copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album to determine if the material was still intact. At the end of July, attorney Peter Scoolidge made his way to the Eastern District Courthouse at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn.