We’ve been following the long and storied saga of Martin Shkreli and his $2 million Wu-Tang Clan album for some time now, but it’s now come to light that the album in question might actually be a fake.
When Martin Shkreli purchased the supposedly one and only copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon A Time In Shaolin in 2015, music fans were outraged, having hoped that someone a bit more charitable may have been the purchaser.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Domingo Neris, manager of core Wu-Tang Clan member U-God, has stated that the record is “not an authorized Wu-Tang Clan album, it never was.”
James Ellis, manager for Method Man also added his insight into the ordeal. “When we did the verses, it was for a Cilvaringz album,” he said. “How it became a Wu-Tang album from there? We have no knowledge of that.”
So the question that people are asking right now is, how exactly did the record end up being sold as a Wu-Tang Clan album? Well, it’s hard to say at this point, due to differing points of view. Reportedly, the unofficial leader of the Wu-Tang Clan, RZA, made the album with Moroccan producer Cilvaringz, who later persuaded RZA to release it under the Wu-Tang Clan name in an effort to make the record seem more valuable than it was.
At the time that the record was sold, both RZA and Cilvaringz had claimed that the record was an effort by the entire group, being sold as an effort to, as Bloomberg puts it, “restore the value of music at a time when listeners can download almost any release without paying.” Reportedly, the group members had recorded their parts separately, with only RZA and Cilvaringz having heard the final result.
“The album was recorded in secret with the members not knowing the exact outcome,” RZA had said back in 2015. “But when we announced it to them that this was the plan, everybody agreed that this was a very unique idea.”
Recently, Martin Shkreli took to eBay to try and sell the record, listing the album for the meagre sum of $1. In fact, bidding for the item has only just ended, with the final bid being a massive $1,025,100.00 USD. However, with Shkreli recently being sent to prison for ‘soliciting an assault’ on Hilary Clinton, it’s not known what will actually happen with the record now.
Considering the amount of publicity that this infamous record sale generated, this does seem like an appropriate sort of comeuppance for a man who famously hiked up the price of Daraprim, a 62-year-old drug used for treating parasitic infections, from $13.50 to $750 a tablet.
While we wait and see if the record does indeed sell, or if Martin Shkreli has followed-up on his threat to “break this album in frustration,” check out Wu-Tang Clan’s most recent single, ‘People Say’, below.
