Wu-Tang Clan’s much-storied album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” has been in the news cycle for years after changing ownership and spurring lawsuits, and the melee surrounding the one-of-a-kind project has left group member Method Man with a skewed opinion.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Meth refers to the album as a “circus spectacle” and that it’s an “uncomfortable subject” for the group to discuss. He also claims that “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” was never meant to be a Wu-Tang Clan album, and that an unnamed financier cobbled together old and new verses into the resulting project.
“I thought it was some circus spectacle,” he said. “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 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. 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 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.”
“Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” has been a talking point for Wu-Tang Clan for almost a decade, since notorious “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli purchased the album for $2 million in 2015. After he tried to sell the album on eBay amid legal troubles, the government seized the record and auctioned it off to PleasrDAO in 2021 for $4.75 million.
Last month, PleasrDAO filed a civil suit against Shkreli, claiming that he held onto copies of the album and was playing the album for others on the internet. A judge put a temporary restraining order on Shkreli from disseminating or selling the album, and a hearing is currently scheduled for August 23 in Brooklyn to review the matter.
Soon after the restraining order, PleasrDAO made a five-minute sampler of “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” available as a $1 purchase on thealbum.com. The company shared that the sample was put up for sale to bring them one step closer to getting the full project out before its contractual release date of October 8, 2103.
For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
