PleasrDAO Paid $4 Milion For Wu-Tang Clan's Once Upon A Time in Shaolin Album

At the end of July, attorney Peter Scoolidge made his way to the Eastern District Courthouse at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn. The courthouse was hardly an unusual destination for the lawyer, but that day, he had a bizarre assignment: Listen to the lone existing copy of Wu-Tang Clan's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album to determine if the material was still intact. Scoolidge had bought a Discman for the occasion, and he popped in the album under the watchful eyes of around 10 members of law enforcement, representatives from the U.S. Marshals service, the U.S. attorney’s office, and the Department of Justice. “As you can imagine, the tracks have a lot of colorful language on them, [so] there’s a lot of giggling [as] people who are not hip-hop people [are] listening to this stuff,” Scoolidge says. “It was pretty funny. Giggling U.S. Marshals is just the latest odd episode in the life of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which was bought by an anonymous entity in July. On Wednesday, a group called PleasrDAO revealed that it was ultimately behind the purchase, which cost the collective $4 million. Wu-Tang auctioned off the album, which was both lambasted as an elitist stunt-art hoax and embraced as a shrewd protest against digitization’s erosion of music’s value, for $2 million in 2015. The buyer back then was Martain Shkreli a hedge-fund and pharmaceutical executive who was quickly becoming one of the most reviled men in America. Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was subsequently seized by the U.S. government before making its way to PleasrDAO, a group with a passion for buying digital collectibles honoring “anti-establishment rebels” — their previous purchases include NFT's connected to Edward Snowden and the Russian band Pussy Riot. (Nadya from Pussy Riot is now a PleasrDAO member. As Once Upon a Time in Shaolin got a new owner, it also gained a new layer of complexity. What was a resolutely physical product the album comes in an ornate silver box accompanied by a leather-bound booklet has sprouted a digital component: an NFT deed of ownership. This means the buyer of the album will be memorialized in the blockchain-verse. This beautiful piece of art, this ultimate protest against middlemen and rent seekers of musicians and artists, went south by going into the hands of Martin Shkreli, the ultimate internet villain,” says Jamis Johnson, PleasrDAO’s 34-year-old Chief Pleasing Officer. That’s a real title. By purchasing the album, We want this to be us bringing this back to the people. We want fans to participate in this album at some level.

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