Rare Wu-Tang Clan Album Will Finally Be Heard - in Tasmania

Fans will finally have the opportunity to hear that rare CD-only Wu-Tang Clan album that has been locked away in a vault inside a nickel and silver box and wasn't supposed to be played until 2103. But they'll have to go to Tasmania to do so.

The album, titled Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, will be part of a private listening event, held from June 15-24, at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. On the museum's exhibit page it says, "You hear talk about once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. This is probably one of them."

Visitors to the event will be allowed to "experience" some of the 31 tracks on the group's seventh studio album.

Free tickets to the event will be available beginning on Thursday (May 30), "if you are lucky enough to secure them."

The Wu-Tang Clan created the plan to lock away the rare recording as a protest against music losing its value in the streaming era. However, the plan when sideways when the album was bought by Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical investor who was convicted of fraud in 2017.

Shkreli bought the album at an auction for $2 million, but it was later seized by the government and then sold to help pay off Shkreli's debt of close to $7.4 million.

The rare album ended up being purchased by an NFT collective, PleasrDAO, which ponied up $4 million for it in 2021.

The Wu-Tang listening sessions, which will run for 10 days only, are part of an exhibit dubbed "Namedropping," designed to look at celebrity, status, and culture. Also featured in the exhibit are Porsche, Madonna, Henry Kissinger, Air Jordan, McDonald's, and Henry VIII.

"Every once in a while, an object on this planet possesses mystical properties that transcend its material circumstances," Jarrod Rawlins, the museum's director of curatorial affairs, said in a statement to The Guardian. "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is more than just an album, so when I was thinking about status, and what a transcendent name drop could be, I knew I had to get it into this exhibition."

In a video posted on X, the Wu-Tang Clan appears to be giving fans a little taste of the rare recording to the delight of those lucky enough to be given the pleasure.

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Wu-Tang Clan