Being in jail will do that to you!
Martin “Pharma Bro” Shkreli now has less to brag about, as a New York federal judge has ordered him to surrender his rare, unreleased Wu-Tang Clan album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
Starting with Shkreli, he is an infamous and widely disliked figure due to obtaining the license for the drug Daraprim (an antiparasitic) and raising the price to $750 a pill, making the drug unaffordable to those who need it. He was convicted in 2017 for securities fraud (defrauding investors) and ended up spending six years in prison.
Now, how does the Wu-Tang Clan get involved in all this? Well, in 2015, the group recorded the album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, but released it—or, dare I say, didn’t release the 31-track album—in a very unique way. Wanting to return music to the “value of fine art,” the group only released a single copy of the album and put it up for auction. In the words of the group themselves, “The intrinsic value of music has been reduced to zero. Contemporary art is worth millions by virtue of its exclusivity… By adopting a 400-year-old Renaissance-style approach to music, offering it as a commissioned commodity, and allowing it to take a similar trajectory from creation to exhibition to sale… we hope to inspire and intensify urgent debates about the future of music.” The winner of the $2 million bid (as you guessed) ended up being the infamous “Pharma Bro,” much to the disappointment of the group members (who ended up donating the proceeds to charity after finding out that Shkreli was the buyer). Shkreli has, in the past, streamed parts of the album to some of his viewers on social media.
To pay off his $7.4 million in court debt, Shkreli was forced to part with his rare media piece, which is now owned by PleasrDAO, a cryptocurrency company currently suing Shkreli for making copies of the album and allegedly planning to release them to the public in some form.
In my opinion, I get what the Wu-Tang Clan was trying to do, but I feel like they might have gone about the “fine art” angle the wrong way. As an example, I can only see the real Mona Lisa in person, but it’s not like I can never see what the Mona Lisa looks like via copies of it. Any copies don’t devalue the magic and value of the original art piece. I don’t want to claim myself as a musical artist with even close to their talent or wisdom, but I feel like maybe releasing an exclusive collector’s edition or making the tracks only hearable at concerts or events would have been a better approach.
My name is Josie! Lover of music, video games, and other silly stuff. I also own too many plushies.
