Wu-Tang's Time Capsule
The A-side to Track 25 // Vol. 06 Future Anticipation
Remember when time capsules were a thing in the 90s?
Back in the day, my elementary school put one together to commemorate its centennial anniversary. My sister’s middle school made a video for their time capsule, with the intention to watch the tape after a decade passed. Both of those schools closed down a few years later, so who knows if and where those capsules are buried now. (Hopefully they threw in a VHS player along with it.)
In 1992, Nickelodeon announced their own time capsule over a series of promos, culminating at a live burial ceremony at Universal Studios, Florida. Mike O’Malley, the host of Guts and Kurt’s Dad for you Gleeks, (“Grab a piece of the Aggro Crag!”) hosted the event along with then, teen heartthrob, Joey Lawrence of Blossom. A decoy Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future, made a surprise appearance, racing back from the year 2042 in his Delorean to tell us that Gak, Nickelodeon’s toy slime, disappears 50 years into the future. (So, into the time capsule Gak goes!) Some of the other objects locked away included an MC Hammer CD, Reebok Pump sneakers, Hostess Twinkies, and for gravitas, a piece of the Berlin Wall. (You can relive it all on YouTube here, it’s so 90s I could cry all over my purple and teal windbreaker.)
Back to the future. I’m so tickled at the thought of someone opening that time capsule in 2042 with zero context, wondering how these objects were chosen—as mundane trinkets of culture or as valuable artifacts? When archeologists started cataloging the contents of ancient Egyptian tombs, they discovered both, while encountering so many more mysteries. What will people think that crusty jar of Gak is?!
In this last essay as part of Volume 06’s theme: Future Anticipation, I wanted to explore two examples of art-as-time capsules and the artists who made work for future audiences. Hip hop supergroup Wu-Tang Clan and Swedish painter Hilma af Klint both created art intended to skip a generation, not for contemporary consumption.
On March 26, 2014, RZA, the self-described “abbott” the group, announced a new Wu-Tang Clan album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. But there was a catch. They planned to produce one sole physical album, with stipulations that the buyer could not commercially release the music for profit until 88 years after its initial sale. No other copies exist—including digital—and the recordings incorporated strict anti-piracy technology. Hilma af Klint specified in her will that her spiritually-charged abstract paintings could only be shown 20 years after her death. What compels artists to make the choice to do this? Is it selfish or sacrificial?
Track 25 is about artists ahead of their time. Time capsules. Graveyard gratification. Delusional thinking! Life is short, legacy is forever. Play the long game.
For the sake of length (and sanity), I’m splitting Track 25 over two posts. So for this week, we’ll focus on Wu-Tang’s story; next week will continue with Hilma af Klint. (Promise me you’ll read them both!)
Nearly a decade ago, when the news first broke that Wu-Tang recorded an album and planned to put it up for auction, I followed the headlines, intrigued by the premise. If you’re familiar with RZA, you know his art is deeply intertwined with Eastern philosophy. His creative process is thoughtful and intentional; his business acumen strives towards innovation. Why go through all the effort of getting the band together, writing, recording, mixing, and mastering an album, for a single buyer? Why risk instigating the fandom’s rage by making their music inaccessible? As you can imagine, loyal fans and critics alike criticized it as a capitalist scheme—but that was essentially the point. It wasn’t until the shocking reveal that Martin Shkreli, aka “Pharma Bro,” the disgraced CEO who jacked up the prices of AIDS medication, was the buyer, that the story went from dynamite to nuclear. (We’ll come back to that.)
So what was the point of auctioning an album? The New York Times sums it up best as “a protest against the devaluation of music in the digital era.” The entire process of funding, creating, and auctioning Once Upon a Time in Shaolin interrogated the value of music in contrast and in parallel to the fine art world. A senior consultant to the project, Cyrus Bozorgmehr, chronicled the years spent developing the album in his memoir, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin: The Untold Story of Wu-Tang Clan’s Million Dollar Secret Album, The Devaluation of Music, and America’s New Public Enemy No.1. In its introduction, Bozorgmehr takes a snapshot of the past, pre-digital music industry:
“The music industry model was always based on two main foundations—mass production and egalitarianism. An artist sells one original piece, or limited-edition prints, but a musician can sell millions of units. All of them are affordable, and outside of rare editions, everyone has a shot at buying them with no one paying more or less than anyone else.”
The music industry post-Napster, changed this entirely. We now expect music to be free, at our fingertips, and widely shared. Bozorgmehr argues that music used to be treated like art, but our attitudes shifted without our previous emotional and financial investment in it. He adds, “the less effort people have to make for something, the less they value it.” He argues that even if the investment isn’t financial, the end product requires some kind of sacrifice, for example, the time and effort people spent going to record stores, waiting in lines, collecting CDs, etc. In this modern era, “sacrifice is almost always represented by money,” and he ultimately asks us, “does placing economic value on something directly affect how we experience it?” (Indulge me—without thinking too hard, what is your knee jerk reaction to that question?)
We understand the tension RZA feels about digital culture from his 2009 book, The Tao of Wu. He describes listening to a vinyl record and the MP3 of the same music as very different experiences: “They sound almost nothing like each other, even though they're the same song…it’s reduced, simplified, lost.” For RZA, digital culture sharpens our images, but dulls our sounds, and in doing so, obscures our reality. He claims, “Digital culture brought a step away from truth.” Could music in this digital era become art again—not as it was before, but as something that transcends our previous receptions of it? Could a contemporary album become a unique fine art object with an aura, exclusive access, and value to rival the world’s greatest paintings?
As the business and marketing consultant to the album, even Bozorgmehr shared mixed feelings to this kind of elitist commodification:
“The much-heralded democratization of the digital had, like so many revolutions before it, morphed into a new tyranny. Recorded music was increasingly viewed as worthless, and getting heard was more difficult than ever as the ease of production and digital distribution created a new enemy—saturation. Independents were buckling, development budgets were a distant memory, and perhaps most worrying of all, the perception of music had shifted into something between voracious consumerism and a God-given right. But commodifying music even further and placing it squarely in the hands of the wealthy? That was a step too far for me.”
As I read more about the negotiations, contingency plans, legal calculations, and philosophical questions that pushed this album forward, what impressed me most was how they built hype around the project, not just in the media, but by focusing on building institutional connections. They consulted and explored collaborations with auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s, academic titans like Harvard University, and top international museums, before ultimately breaking with the art and academic establishment. Such an unprecedented project required a new way to trail blaze past art industry gatekeepers. RZA and his producer and partner in this project, Cilvaringz, chose Paddle8, a then, up-and-coming online auction house to broker the sale (now, defunct). They collaborated with MoMA PS1 and music critic, Sasha Frere-Jones for the album’s first and last public listening session, which played 13 minutes of the album to critics and (very) lucky lottery winners. (Available on YouTube here.)
According to Rolling Stone, the album was a banger, harkening back to the classic Wu-Tang sound that set them apart in the 90s. Critic in attendance, Christopher Weingarten wrote:
“Whether you entered the dome thinking the elaborate packaging—hand-carved nickel casing, 174-page annotated leather-bound book—and high price was brilliant art or high-concept hucksterism, all arguments screeched to a halt when hearing the music. Simply put, if the full, 128-minute Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is as solid as the 13 minutes heard Monday night, it could be the group’s most popular album since 1997.”
It’s true, the 31-track album consisted of two CDs encased in a handcrafted box with beautifully detailed Moroccan metalwork. A master Serbian bookbinder gilded and bound the accompanying manuscript on parchment. This entire art package lived in a vault at the Royal Mansour Hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco until its official owner manifested. And perhaps the most mysterious and luxurious part of it all: Cher. Cher is on this album. CHER!
So then, what was to prevent the new owner of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin from releasing Wu-Tang’s music on their own terms, licensing it out for profit, and banking on a return of investment? Would the album’s earning potential drive up its value, or would its commodification undermine its worth as a unique art object? This is where the time capsule comes in. One of the stipulations in the buyer’s contract was an 88-year non-commercialization clause, extending beyond most legal copyrights. Why 88 years? The number 8 holds auspicious symbolism for Wu-Tang and in Chinese culture, and according to Bozorgmehr, that timeframe “had the symbolic advantage of allowing everyone to picture a general release in the twenty-second century—the unveiling of a time capsule that would unleash a frozen moment form the golden age of hip-hop onto a whole new society.” For additional explanation, Cilvaringz told Forbes:
“We felt that retail commercialization and mass replication would dilute the status of the album as a one-off work of art and compromise the integrity of our statement. We thought long and hard about whether to defy art-world conventions and transfer all rights to public release to the buyer. But we genuinely felt that a swift public release after such a radical concept would neutralize the statement we are making. So we decided that the right to release the album would be transferred only after eighty-eight years have passed.”
To clarify, the buyer could share the music for free in a format like a listening party, but could not resell it, license it, or make any profits off of commercializing it. It’s a very cheeky premise! What kind of buyer would spend millions only to release it for free, effectively devaluing their investment, knowing that they could never profit from it during their lifetime? Robin Hood? Do you dig up the time capsule before it’s time?
After fielding some fake and genuine bids, RZA and Cilvaringz finally found a buyer, a young, successful business dude named Martin Shkerli. He charmed them with his story of humble beginnings and inked the $2 million deal before revealing his true colors. Shortly after the contracts finalized, he became the most-hated person in America, infamously known as the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who raised the price of a popular AIDS and cancer medication, Daraprim, from $13.50 a pill, to $750.00. It doesn’t stop there—he fanned the flames of the bad press, cartoon villain-style, acting increasingly erratic and obnoxious in interviews and on his own social media accounts.
The team behind Once Upon a Time in Shaolin wanted to keep their controversial buyer a secret until they figured out a plan, in anticipation of the terrible optics and outrage that would immediately follow. Behind the scenes, Shkerli seemed to cooperate with plans to lay low, even agreeing to several potential scenarios that would vilify him further in the media. The story eventually broke after an executive at Paddle8 mentioned “off the record” to a Forbes journalist that the album had been sold. Once Martin got outed, he went rogue, disrespecting RZA in interviews, posting a video of him using the CDs as a coaster (!!!), threatening to destroy the album, and announcing that he would release the album for free if Trump won in 2016. In 2017, he tried to sell it on eBay, but couldn’t complete the sale because he got arrested.
After all of that drama, in 2018, Martin Shkreli got convicted of securities fraud and served four years out of a seven-year sentence. The U.S. Department of Justice seized over $7 million of his assets including Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, putting it in ownership limbo—a scenario RZA and Cilvaringz never anticipated despite their meticulous planning. In 2021, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin found a new owner—or, should I say owners. The cryptocurrency collective, PleasurDAO bought the album from the government for $4 million. They dubbed it “the OG NFT.” I rolled my eyes at first, but the symmetry is kind of poetic.
In this video by PleasurDAO, “Chief Pleasing Officer” Jamis Johnson explains the alignment between this work of art and crypto, while documenting his first listen:
“This is like the OG NFT, right? The original fight against the middlemen who are rent- seeking—and crypto is the same ethos. Wu-Tang Clan was prescient in understanding that conflict.”
The first NFT, Quantum, was minted in 2014, the same year Wu-Tang announced this album. While this technology just missed the timing of the project’s conceptualization—it feels almost fated that Once Upon a Time in Shaolin ended up in this crypto space. From my cursory understanding, NFTs were created to solve limitations within the Bitcoin blockchain, and also, to empower artists, who gained more agency and profit by selling their work directly to buyers. (Does anyone else see ‘blockchain’ and picture a necklace of legos? No? Cool cool cool yeah me neither.)
NFTs also bridge physical and digital assets. For example, I recently bought a print that also came with an NFT counterpart. This is an increasingly common practice for artists to offer both physical and digital versions. In a parallel way, RZA and Cilvaringz chose to produce Once Upon a Time in Shaolin on a CD. Why not a vinyl record? It’s a more enduring medium that also emphasizes the physical, analog nature of the art object. Also, we barely have CD players now—how would they still exist in the 22nd century? But remember, CDs bridge the analog and the digital, and in choosing that medium, they acknowledged the album’s inevitable future as an asset in the digital world, however it evolves, however RZA distrusts its culture.
I’m encouraged by PleasurDAO’s ownership—they have the support of the album’s creators, and they want to release the music free to the public while respecting the original contract. As they explore ways to do this, I’m cautiously hopeful that we’ll get to hear this album in our lifetimes, while considering its true message—valuing music as a priceless work of art and honoring artists’ work through fair compensation. Cilvaringz makes this clear in an interview with Forbes:
“This album is not about the fans. This is about fellow artists first. It’s about us.”
Sure, it’s a little hard to swallow when rich and successful artists make a statement like that, through an opulent, well-resourced project like this. But, at its core, Wu-Tang took a huge risk, and I believe their intent conveyed a for artists, by artists solidarity. If it were really about the money, Wu-Tang could have generated more revenue beyond the original $2 million auction price (plus the $4 million in cryptocurrency, which the government received as $2.2 million USD through PleasurDAO’s intermediary), if they released it, licensed it, and toured it themselves.
I wholeheartedly believe in the importance of art accessibility and artist agency. This project highlights this tension between them. I wish we could all hear this album! After researching and thinking about its implications, however, I don’t feel denied participation of its art experience, even at my frustration of not being able to listen to it. I feel strange admitting that, but it’s true. Over the last several weeks, I read Bozorgmehr’s book, watched RZA and Cilvarginz’s interviews, read articles, listened to Wu-Tang records, talked about it with friends, and through that process, I feel that much more connected to the work. Because I couldn’t access the music, I sought out everything else to learn more about it—and there is a wealth of content out there. I’m reminded of this earlier quotation: “The less effort people have to make for something, the less they value it.” I realize that I value an album I’ve never heard, for the amount of effort and time I “sacrificed” to understand it.
The creators behind this mysterious project were strategic in the ways they revealed the intent, craft, and mythology behind the music and the art of its packaging. The transparent storytelling in Bozorgmehr’s book and the panel discussion/listening event at MoMA PS1 gave us enough to keep feeling invested, curious, and wanting more. If you read past the headlines, RZA and Cilvaringz’s commentary on music value and advocacy for fellow artists rang clear. The dramatic media arc chronicling its ownership also showed how law and technology catalyze the evolution of art in strange, unpredictable ways. And frankly, it stirred emotions and pissed a lot of people off, including Method Man! (A fandom’s rage is its own kind of collective effervescence.) And while 36 Chambers will likely be forever lauded as Wu-Tang’s best and most important album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin sits peerless in its own continuum, projecting the sounds of their past, interrogating present art practices, and anticipating its place in the future, beyond existing technologies.
If critics had any assumptions that an 88-year contractual cage would render the music dormant and irrelevant over time, the unexpected journey this album faced in the last decade alone has revealed even more questions and possibilities than RZA or Cilvaringz ever originally conceptualized. I’m left thinking about the contemporary cultural impact of this project. What measure of generational inspiration gets lost by withholding this music? Will this be remembered as an ego trip or a paradigm shift?
I’ll leave it there for now. We’ll pick back up for the B-side to this track, featuring Hilma af Klint.
Thanks for reading.
(And if you made it this far, thanks for your patience! Where have I been this month?! Writer’s block and winter blues joined forces and hit me unexpectedly hard. Still working through it, so please forgive the slowness!)
OK, I just read a sentence that made me think about this article. I’m gonna paraphrase it for our purposes: “In an industry in which all who practice are scrambling for crumbs of success, to even quietly [challenge said industry] can be daunting.” I can’t know what Klint was thinking, but I know that work taking on the status quo is often inconsistent with achieving status through making that work…so the urge to compromise or water down for the sake of “crumbs of success” is always there. A posthumous release is a solution against this. It allows you to take outrageous risk, for its own sake, and not have to face the backlash. Cowardly? You could say so. But you could also say unselfish and self-aware.
“does placing economic value on something directly affect how we experience it?”
Knee jerk yes. But not necessarily that we value it MORE. I notice that we’re so wired to value money for its own sake that as soon as we give it up for something, we start nitpicking and looking for shortcomings in that something.
I’ve seen this mostly in the context of food or direct services. For music and art, I do think ppl assume it’s not that great if they can get it easily and/or cheaply (ex. the world class violinist who played in a subway station and no one noticed).
Also: I felt palpable frustration at not being able to access Yassin Bey (aka Mos Def)’s last album, since it was exclusively released as a museum exhibit. I’m not mad at him, but I’m not sure it made me value his music any more. It just kinda felt like him taking his frustration out on the market (which is his right). Wu-Tang’s stunt felt a little more like performance art proper, a little more layered and thought out.