Method Man says Martin Shkreli's Wu-Tang Clan album wasn't even "supposed" to be a Wu-Tang album

One of the signs our reality had really gone off the rails is when the Wu-Tang Clan made an album that only had one single copy, and “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli bought it, and then he got arrested for securities fraud and the album was seized by the government, which then sold it to a cryptocurrency art collective. We’re several reality warping events past that now, but the Once Upon A Time In Shaolin saga remains one of the oddest pop culture stories of the late 2010s, and perhaps most representative of the era.

But Once Upon A Time In Shaolin wasn’t meant to be “some circus spectacle,” as Method Man calls it in a new interview with Vanity Fair. The single-copy gimmick was spearheaded by producer Cilvaringz and RZA, to whom Method Man has “never really [spoken]” about it. “The process of the thing being made was never told to us. We were never told what it was,” the rapper explained. “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.”

The plot, as they say, thickens. According to Method Man, he hasn’t even talked to the other members of the collective about it much, because it’s an “uncomfortable subject.” He admitted, “We all had a problem with it because that’s not how it was described to us.”

RZA has always championed the project, saying he hoped “the debate that our approach has sparked might eventually lead to a change in the perception, value and appreciation of music as a work of art and that is why we feel the sacrifice is worth it.” But even he had a problem when the album ended up in the hands of Shkreli, saying in 2021 that the deal was made “before it was revealed … his character, his personality, and all of the insidious things he would go on to do.” The current owners, PleasrDAO, have “more of a Wu vibe,” at least according to RZA. The crypto collective has followed the directive not to release Once Upon A Time In Shaolin into the world, but has held listening parties for people to enjoy the music, which presumably fulfills RZA’s wish for the album to “[expand] itself in the world and its own life of itself.”

Meanwhile, PleasrDAO is currently suing Martin Shkreli for making digital copies of the album and playing it for online audiences. “It was literally allowed. It was their lack of diligence that is astonishing,” Shkreli posted on Twitter/X. And the beat goes on.