It has sold twice, the first time for $2 million and the last for $4.75 million, but the unique Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin isn't a fond memory for group member Method Man. In an interview with Vanity Fair, the 53-year-old rapper—born Clifford Smith Jr.—says the entire topic is "an uncomfortable subject to most of the guys, so we don't really discuss it too much." He explains that the very process of making the album remains a little murky.
- "We were never told what it was. 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. We all had a problem with it because that's not how it was described to us."
It first ended up in the hands of "pharma bro" Martin Shkreli, who shelled out $2 million for it at auction in 2015. After he ran into trouble with the law and attempted to resell it, the feds seized the album and auctioned it to the musical collective PleasrDAO in 2021 for $4.75 million, per Variety. It was all a "circus spectacle," recalls Method Man. Variety notes the album is once again in the news because PleasrDAO has sued Shkreli, accusing him of making copies of the album whose big selling point is that only one copy exists. Read the full Vanity Fair interview, in which Method Man talks about the origins of the group as well as his solo career. (More Wu Tang Clan stories.)
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