Utah: A hip-hop miracle was happening Friday afternoon in a mansion in the mountains of Utah.
The sole physical copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s 31-track double album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” - the most expensive piece of recorded music in the world - was being played at a listening party for only the seventh time in its history, for about 40 people at the Sundance Film Festival.The party was something of a prison break for the album, which was first bought at a 2015 auction for $2m by now-convicted fraudster and “Pharma Bro,” Martin Shkreli.
The album’s remarkable journey is the subject of “The Disciple,” a documentary from director Joanna Natasegara that premiered at the festival Thursday. Recorded in secret from 2007 to 2013, “Shaolin” features verses from almost every member of the legendary hip-hop collective, as well as from Method Man’s closest rap collaborator Redman and Wu-Tang affiliate group the Killa Beez, alongside FC Barcelona players, the Dutch actress Carice van Houten and Cher.
Wu-Tang’s de facto leader RZA and his “student,” Dutch-Moroccan rapper-producer Tarik “Cilvaringz” Azzougarh, conceived of it as an art project and a commentary on music being cheapened by pirating and the internet.
“We’ll make one single album, treat it like it’s the Mona Lisa,” RZA says in a podcast interview that opens the film.
And a Mona Lisa it nearly is. To this day, no downloadable or streamable copy of the album exists. It was burned as a two-CD album, deleted off the laptop and CD drive, sold at auction and presented to Shkreli in a handcrafted ornate silver box. During the sales pitch, RZA described it as “like owning the scepter of an Egyptian king.”
Three years later, the discs were seized as part of Shkreli’s conviction for securities fraud. The album then languished in a Justice Department storage vault until 2021, when the federal government sold it to an anonymous group of digital art collectors for the equivalent of $4m or more in cryptocurrency.
The art collective, PleasrDAO, has an elaborate plan to eventually make the album more public - while respecting an 88-year non-commercialization clause in the sale contract that means no one will be able to own a copy until 2103. They’re so serious about protecting the album from piracy that they didn’t allow Natasegara to use any of it in “The Disciple.” But they did answer the call when she asked for help celebrating the premiere, having the relic carted to Park City under heavy security so around 20 minutes of its two-hour-12-minute play time could be shared with the chosen few.
It’s “a Russian doll situation,” Cyrus Bozorgmehr, a friend of Cilvaringz who helped broker the original deal, said at the party. The album rests in a silver CD case inside a small silver box, inside a hand-carved nickel-silver box, inside a cedarwood carrying case wrapped in brown cow leather. Everything is embossed with the Wu-Tang “W,” including a specially carved key.
“The Disciple” presents Pleasr as heroes intent on rescuing the project from Shkreli’s ignominy and the ephemerality of the digital age.
hey are “working actively” to bring the music to the public, possibly in the form of museum exhibits.
