The ultimate music mystery
If you thought the saga of Wu-Tang Clan’s one-of-one album, Once Upon A Time in Shaolin, was just a legendary flex, think again. For years, the record has been locked away, impossible to hear unless you were lucky enough to hit a special, rare listening event.
Now, thanks to a crossover with the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, we’ve finally got a taste of what’s actually on the disc. The podcast teamed up with the current owners, the crypto art collective PleasrDAO, to host a private listening session. The main character energy of the moment? They brought in none other than Wu-Tang legend Method Man to hear it—who, surprisingly, had never even heard the final product himself.
A chaotic history
Real talk, this album’s journey is wilder than any fiction. It was famously bought at auction in 2015 by Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical executive who essentially turned the album into a personal souvenir. Per contractual agreements, the album isn't allowed to be commercially released until the year 2103.
After Shkreli was caught up in legal drama, the U.S. government seized the record as part of his assets. Eventually, PleasrDAO stepped in, buying it in 2021. They’ve been letting it see the light of day at select exhibitions, but for the rest of us, it’s been a total L.
Where to find the heat
The podcast episode documenting the listening party includes the reactions from Method Man and, more importantly for us, two short snippets of the music. You can catch the audio clips at the 32:30 and 39:02 timestamps in the episode. It’s a major W for hip-hop historians who have been waiting almost a decade to know if the album lived up to the hype.
Why it matters
For years, this album was the ultimate example of scarcity-based marketing, but it lowkey became a symbol of how gatekeeping music in a digital age just feels... weird. Getting to hear even a few seconds of it pulls back the curtain on one of the most expensive and mysterious artifacts in music history.
