Famous Album is a “circus spectacle”

It was sold twice, the first time for $2 million and the last time for $4.75 million, but the unique Wu-Tang Clan album Once upon a time in Shaolin is not a nice memory for group member Method Man. In an interview with Vanity FairThe 53-year-old rapper, born Clifford Smith Jr., says the whole subject is “an uncomfortable subject for most guys, so we don’t really talk about it much.” He explains that the process of creating the album itself is still a little unclear.

• “We were never told what it was. It was never supposed to be a Wu-Tang album. We recorded a certain number of records and were paid to do it by a guy I don’t want to name. He took all these verses – some of them were old verses – and put them together 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.”

It first landed in the hands of “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, who paid $2 million for it at auction in 2015. After he ran afoul of the law and tried to resell it, the government confiscated the album and auctioned it off to music collective PleasrDAO for $4.75 million in 2021. diversity. It was all a “circus spectacle,” Method Man remembers. diversity notes that the album is once again in the news because PleasrDAO has sued Shkreli, accusing him of making copies of the album, the big selling point of which is that only one copy exists. Read the full Vanity Fair Interview in which Method Man talks about the group’s origins and his solo career. (More stories about Wu Tang Clan.)