What We Think About When We Think About ‘Once Upon A Time In Shaolin’
From music people expect pure emotion but from art they demand explanation.
— Agnes Martin
Do you believe in the messenger or his message? I believe in the message…I’ve always felt that way, that knowledge is like God, out there behind labels and images.
— RZA, The Tao of Wu
[-22 OUATIS]: Wu-Tang Revisited
The story of Wu-Tang is a lot like Brideshead Revisited, with Raekwon as the guy with the teddy bear and Ghost as the other guy. Or maybe the saga of the Clan is more like Enter the 36 Anna Kareninas. Or maybe Meth & Red are like Astaire & Rogers. But I’m not trying to get into all that, it’s too big.
There are three decades of history. There are eight uniquely talented members, a hundred affiliates, six albums, twenty-two official compilations, a hundred solos, mixtapes and collabos. Freestyles, original uncleared sample versions, remixes? I have about two hundred tracks of those. What you realize is Wu sound good over any type of beat: Chinese opera, 8-bit Nintendo, old school, dub, The Nutcracker…it doesn’t matter, they go in hard.
There’s books about them, by them. Some are very good. They had their own clothing line, an origin story TV show — who’s had that? No one. — and a couple of documentaries. They changed the sound forever, how record deals were made. They pumped out records without losing momentum or quality for years. Until…they did. Between the Guitar Center ad and the basic bitch 8th grade elevator classical of his recent ballet, RZA alone has gone from The Abbot to Costello.
We need a Shaolin Smithsonian, a Department of Wu Studies with a quarterly journal. There are so many unanswered questions. What if ODB had lived? Why is the sky blue? Why is water wet? What if Killah Priest hadn’t overslept? Why does Raekwon like saying ‘Somalian’ so much?
But Once Upon A Time In Shaolin interests me—how do you write about a record none of us can listen to? And to paraphrase Raymond Carver: it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about Once Upon A Time In Shaolin.
Basic Assumptions Before Leaving Earth
1. The album will be referred to as OUATIS: it sounds like a demigod, or distant mystery planet in an old sci-fi book, like Solaris (or a 1956 Swedish epic poem about a lost spaceship, we’ll get to that.)
2. Also I ain’t typing all that over and over.
3. All date notations will be +/- OUATIS, from its sale in 2015 that started the 88 year clock.
[0 OUATIS]: Enter The etc.
You hear rap artists now, talking about how their wrist is ‘frosty’ or ‘frozen’ and how ‘the bling-bling will blind you.’ Well, maybe it will. Maybe it already blinded you. Rocking too much bling can reveal a hole in a man, an emptiness he’s trying to fill with diamonds.
— RZA
The story of OUATIS is worth reciting, because it’s so insane, and without it we’d have forgotten it exists.
Once upon a time in the ’00s, RZA and Cilvaringz (the weed carrier to end all weed carriers) are extremely high and: “What if…we made an album, and there was only…like…one copy?” And the difference between RZA and the rest of us is, when he has a dumb idea when he’s extremely high, he can actually do it.
Across seven years, they bring in the Clan and a bizarre panoply of guests, including Carice van Houten from Game of Thrones, Cher, and some FC Barcelona soccer players. It’s stitched together into 31 tracks and once pressed as a double CD, all other copies destroyed — there is only one in existence. It’s sealed with a wax Wu logo in a silver jewel-encrusted case with a leather-bound lyrics book and a gold-leaf authenticity certificate, then placed in the vault of the Casablanca Royal Mansour Hotel and put up for auction. The stipulations of sale were that it could not be duplicated, distributed or streamed for 88 years, only played live or released for free.
Remember the deluxe coffee table book in a limited edition of 36, encased in a 400lb. four-foot metal globe…thing, which was yours for just $360,000? Nope. It had similar intentions — the intersection of high-end luxury rarity and rap, the insecurity of seeking a longer-lasting eminence beyond the music…but mostly, to get $12,960,000.
The differences between Legacy and OUATIS are: one is a coffee table book of photos in a giant ballsack (it’s a callback to the “Torture” skit?), one is a new album. And, Legacy lacked a villain. If someone else had bought OUATIS — Bob Dylan is a Wu fan apparently, or a Saudi prince, or Kiera Knightley or whatever — we’d have been all, “damn, that’s crazy,” and that would’ve been it.
Enter the villain: Martin Shkreli. The ultimate Teen Wolf of Wall Street douche. The pharma bro: buying drug patents for rare diseases and AIDS-related toxoplasmosis, and hiking the price 20–50x. Buy or die, bitches! His smirky, weasely testimony to Congress must be seen to be believed. He argues, rightly, that that’s how capitalism works: to maximise profit. He’s not wrong.
This pasty ratfuck with the world’s most punchable face places the winning $2 million bid on OUATIS, because he’s a squirmy little pisshole desperate for status and showing off his ill-gotten gains. (He also bought Kurt Cobain’s credit card and liked to whip it out at Dorsia or whatever asshole restaurant for rich assholes.)
The same month, he raises the price of a life-saving drug from $13.50 a pill to $750 and gets denounced by both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It’s all a didactic Scathing Satire Of Modern Society, some McSweeney’s type bullshit with faux-intelligent messages: the collision of high finance and Black music, Wall Street vs. Stapleton Houses, art and commerce, etc. etc.
Shkreli also used new investments to pay off old debts; raising drug prices is legal, but Ponzi schemes aren’t. There’s a high-profile trial where he’s constantly trolling, saying Taylor Swift can listen to the record if she’ll stay overnight and bang him, him and Ghostface exchanging threatening YouTube videos, it’s all so cringy and painful. During jury selection, over a hundred people say they can’t be impartial because “he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan.”
Shkreli gets seven years and forfeits $7 million in assets, including an Enigma machine and OUATIS. (He’d already tried to sell it on eBay for $1 million.) So on some Area 51/end of Raiders of the Lost Ark type shit, OUATIS is government property in some DC basement or Bill Murray-proof secure facility.
Ironic Aaron Sorkin ending, right? No one wins, but the system works and evil is punished. Quick, pump out a paperback and get Netflix on the phone.
(Imagine you’re some low-level Justice Department office worker and OUATIS is just sitting there in a filing cabinet. You know you’d smuggle it out for the night, you wouldn’t be able to help yourself, and you wouldn’t be able to tell anyone or lose your job and 401k.)
[+9 OUATIS]: Wu-Tang in The Age of Digital Consumption
So in 2021, the Justice Department sells it for $4.75 million to something called PleasrDAO, rebooting from pharma bro to crypto bros. One of those very ’20s companies: missing a vowel, too online, young and cute, kombucha drinking, microdosing, pretending to be cutting edge and benevolent, but just shaking down VC investment and hustling digital horseshit. What do these people actually do? They…collect NFTs of…Pussy Riot and Edward Snowden?
PleasrDAO was initially organized on Twitter in March 2021 in order to purchase Pplpleasr’s genesis Non-Fungible Token (NFT). The animation, titled x*y=k, was created to celebrate the Uniswap V3 launch, and all proceeds from the auction aimed to benefit Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, among other minority groups.
What?
Like all sequels, there’s Revenge of Pharma Bro: Shkreli livestreams the album and Pleasr sues under misappropriation of trade secrets — that it “greatly diminishes and/or destroys the album’s value.” Not that it’s a valuable, unique artwork with cultural significance, but that it’s like the Colonel’s original KFC recipe. It’s an asset.
Pleasr’s frontman is Chief Pleasing Officer (Jesus, FUCK OFF) Jamis Johnson — just as punchable as Shkreli, just as smug and self-satisfied, smarmily convinced he’s revolutionizing things when it’s just another Ponzi scheme, centralizing capital and culture into the hands of the more online and privileged:
the future of art collectives is DAO’s. guppies will be outbid by orgs. you will buy “shares” of an ethos instead of individually bidding.
That’s not how art collectives work, my guy. That’s how hedge funds work. You don’t buy shares of an ethos or a movement or an artistic philosophy.
The Pleasr bitches think they’re a collective of innovators and revolutionaries, just like Wu-Tang. They couldn’t be more wrong. The Clan came from nothing and bonded together to escape violence and poverty, and with scraped together records and gear and their mighty talents created groundbreaking music. Pleasr used their nice teeth and elite educations to leverage investments and spin a bunch of digitized nonsense that has nothing but imaginary value — they don’t do or make anything, except profits.
PleasrDAO sucks OUATIS down the gravity well of digital commodification and limitless reproduction, despite that being the exact opposite of its intent: you can unlock a five minute sampler by minting a $1 NFT of the encrypted album, “verifying ownership of $GME stock,” and “minting an album case on Zora” WHAT THE FUCK DOES ANY OF THAT MEAN? 40,000 people have done this. (You can also just…stream the sampler on YouTube like a normal person.) But now there are 40,000 blockchained or whatever encrypted digital copies out there, the Ark of the Covenant is cracked, the ghosts are melting your face.
And every $1 NFT reduces the 78 years left by 88 seconds…because…that’s how time works? You can accelerate time with money now? I can make it rain on the platform and the train will come? It’s another weird, performative scam, a GoFundMe behind cybersmoke and mirrors: 78 years ÷ 88 seconds x $1 = $28 million (except…so far it’s only $40k).
Then OUATIS finally got displayed in a museum, where they played 30 minutes of it on a Wu-Tang PlayStation 1…and you had to get to the Museum of Old and New Art in…Tasmania. Also guess what: the museum is just a big flex by some rich guy with bad taste who made a fortune with a gambling system. Another grifter on his grift.
The idea was to challenge today’s commodification of art, the devaluation of music financially and culturally; to recapture artistic scarcity in the streaming age, where everything is disposable scrolling. OUATIS does subvert the present notion of music — instant, ubiquitous, free flowing like water from a tap. But before streaming you could turn on the radio.
Creating artificial scarcity becomes another currency, more fetishistic elitism — see also: Mach-Hommy’s $777 vinyls which get flipped on Discogs for twice that. It doesn’t do anything to redress the imbalance between superstar musicians and those whose >1,000 streams aren’t even getting pittances anymore.
OUATIS repeats itself, first as history and then as farce, then as farce again, played out across the bottomless media maw desperate to whip up clicks over whatever is today’s ragebait. The record is more famous than RZA could possibly have hoped for, but for the wrong reasons — he lost control of the narrative. In part, what RZA was aiming for was his art to attract Renaissance-style wealthy patrons, hushed veneration, for rap to be treated at the same level of Mozart — for Black music to be held at the same level as white, by whites.
RZA says he wanted to reclaim the patronage of the Renaissance. But the Medicis were violent and corrupt; patrons are the elite, the exploiters, aristocrats and oligarchs flossing and greedily keeping the arts to themselves. Today’s rapacious scam artists are only different because they lack taste and swag. Even the company OUATIS was originally auctioned through collapsed for pocketing charity money. Swim in the Scrooge McDuck money pools, die by two million dollar bill paper cuts. Cash rules etc.
[-79 OUATIS]: All About The Benjamin
The Pleasr Eric Stoltz looking cutiepie said: “It’s very much as if the Louvre decided to fractionalize the Mona Lisa and distribute a portion of it for the public to own.” THAT’S NOT HOW PAINTINGS WORK. WHY WOULD YOU CHOP THE MONA LISA INTO COLLECTIBLE POSTAGE STAMPS. The reverence for the Mona Lisa and the point of OUATIS is that there are only one of them.
OUATIS was exhibited in Tasmania alongside items belonging to Oppenheimer, Madonna, Kissinger, Henry VIII, something from Porsche and Hello Kitty and McDonald’s. The exhibit was not curated to display esteemed, unique works of art, it’s a show called “Namedropping” about “the nature of status:”
Just try feeling the same way towards a mass-produced paperback copy of the Origin of Species as you do a hand-annotated manuscript. Might we somehow touch the genius of Picasso by holding a ceramic plate created by his studio but not potted and painted by the master himself?
No, playboy. You read Origin of Species for its groundbreaking ideas, you don’t hoard the theory of evolution by buying Darwin’s notebook. A gift shop Picasso plate is of course not the same as an actual Picasso. A Van Gogh poster does not reproduce the brushstrokes, it doesn’t capture the light on the paint in the same way. But an album is an album, whether it’s a bootlegged cassette or a 180gram vinyl original pressing. Its reproducibility is its function.
In Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he argues that mass production of art — photography, movies, printed posters of paintings — devalues their authority and artistic authenticity: their aura. Aura comes from its uniqueness, and its presence; a copy does not have the same aesthetic value. But he doesn’t talk about music at all, because reproducing music doesn’t diminish it — he’s writing not long after electronic recording, with its higher sound resolution, has come into play. And while a recording of a concert isn’t the same as being there, the songs themselves don’t lose aura; an experience is transient and can’t really be compared.
RZA keeps saying shit like: “History demonstrates that great musicians such as Bach, Beethoven and Mozart were held in profoundly high esteem.” But aside from again the elitism of who got to hear them play, their work wasn’t being mass produced.
Benjamin’s second main point is that art began as ceremonial, religious items — statues of gods and madonnas, fixed in their temples. They had cult value. Cult value is maintained in part because some works are only accessible to the priests, or remain covered except for ceremonies. OUATIS achieves and maintains both aura and cult value, as an object and an idea, divorced from its actual function.
[+10 OUATIS]: Mystagogue
Everything about OUATIS is onionized mysteries, layers to be unpeeled. Because OUATIS is a quantum object, a Shrödinger’s box which can’t be determined until opened: maybe it’s an amazing return to Wu form, or it’s shitty, or it’s some fire tracks and some garbage. But because we haven’t heard it, it exists in these three states simultaneously: it’s all of them. It’s none of them. It only becomes one of them when you open the box. And it only has value and interest monetarily and artistically while the box remains shut. It should, but doesn’t, resist all judgement and interpretation.
What is the point of an album no one can listen to? Is keeping it exclusive to one buyer a betrayal of Wu fans, to hip hop which has always struggled to survive, be heard? Does it extend, destroy or tarnish the Wu legacy, or is it just a weird endnote with no impact on all that went before? But what everyone really wants to know is WHAT’S IN THE BOX? Is it real son, is it really real son, is it really real?
Pinky Ring Theory
We can’t even accurately say how many people have heard the whole album. Snippets, samplers, selections have been played for select listening parties a few times now — at MOMA PS1 in 2015, in 2024 at the Tasmanian joint and in the Losaida synagogue where the original 36 Chambers photoshoot took place — but no more than 15–30 minutes of the whole 90.
The reports accrete like apocrypha, rare sightings, cryptozoology. “The selection features blaring firetruck horns, thunking helicopter rotors and a crowd chanting the group’s name with religious fervor.” It has “the rugged, hard-hitting sound that smacks of ’93-‘97 RZA.”
RZA did achieve the reverence, renew the act of careful listening, being present live in the moment, a Tao of Wu, the near-religious experience he aimed for: “I’m trying to catch it all, but it’s like trying to scoop water out of a flowing stream. Just as you’ve grabbed one lyric or melody, another surges up and washes it away.”
It’s all very theatrical, full of showmanship and exclusivity:
A gong rings, and then silence, as a man with gloved hands walks to the front of the room. Swinging his arm in an exaggerated arch, he presses a button on the PlayStation, and then slips the CD inside. In equally dramatic measure, he picks up the controller and hits play.
Did this predispose people to love it? Are the samplers like trailers for movies that turn out to suck, just the money shots? Are people just hearing what they want to hear? What if it’s the one last, great Wu album? Or a close enough simulacrum?
We know from the liner notes it’s mostly Cilvaringz beats. If Cilva can do a pitch-perfect recreation of ’94 RZA, does that lack authenticity? What about when 4th Disciple, Mathematics and True Master were making beats on Wu projects? Are those not ‘real’ Wu songs? Do androids dream of eclectic beats?
Dog Shit Theory
Yeah, we know Method Man says “fuck that album” and it’s “a circus spectacle.” That the rest of the Clan are unhappy; they weren’t told what they were working on. That it’s a Frankenstein album, stitched of dead parts. But Wu was always a dictatorship, not a collective or democracy: RZA said give me five years of total control, and that’s how they triumphed.
Would RZA, one of music’s classic control freaks, make a piece of shit and then try and flog it for millions? On the other hand: Guitar Center ad. He has lost any concept of what sounds good anymore. Maybe it’s like the monolith from 2001 (My god! It’s full of Raekwon!), or maybe instead of transcendent colored lights in there it’s just…fart noises. If so, he’s taken a pointless, disappointing dribble at the end of an ironclad discography and made a myth out of it.
Before the Shkreli, RZA said “Everybody got on the boat, but they didn’t know where the boat was going. But look where it landed. You know what I mean? Hey, it’s not on Gilligan’s Island.”
And the interviewer said: “Well, we don’t know which island it’s going to be on yet, right?”
And RZA said: “We don’t know.”
Mystagogue
None of this really matters, because we just don’t know. We should accept we don’t know, we will not know, we cannot know.
When a record is released, it has to go to war against the world: taste, expectations, critics, sales, haters, fans who can never be satisfied. What if you made the record and saved it from those? A child Battle Angel who can just stay an angel.
I don’t want to hear it. I like it better this way, unknowable like the face of God. I didn’t listen to the sampler until I finished this piece.
There is something about OUATIS that sparks a visceral, overcharged reaction in Wu fans: they either hope with religious fervor it is the Holy Grail of Wu albums, or they’re nauseous and outraged, feel betrayed they can’t hear it and certain it’s complete garbage. Yes, it is a huge fuck you to all of us who aren’t multimillionaires or can’t fly to Tasmania. Making the most expensive album of all time is not an achievement. But there’s an also element that validates RZA’s intent of re-valuing music in an age of streaming disposability: we’ve become too entitled, too spoiled by instant gratification.
It’s also because the Wu are unique in creating an iconography, a mythology, starting from the quantum Shaolin/Staten vibe — a lore to compete with deadly, depressing reality. The masks on the first album cover, the logo that can be put on anything. The alternate names, the uncleared sample versions. RZA walking and walking across Staten Island, in meditation for what will come. And The Floods: RZA’s basement awash, 500 beats lost, most of the original solo records soaked away, and then a second time. And what is OUATIS but an Ark?
Even when RZA couldn’t control the story, it became something weird and large and mythic, with Evil Pee-Wee Herman, the epitome of most everything that’s wrong with white people—the dude is like a modern-day Dr Yacub, wanting to clone Hillary Clinton for sexual purposes and trying to get an early release from prison by claiming he’d cured COVID. And then Dawn of the Planet of the Bored Apes.
Because there aren’t going to be any more Wu records, and in this conscious creation of a mythos, there needed to be a capstone. One that would reinstate that early mystery around them, but also protect itself and the legacy it’s supposed to represent from degradation, appropriation, being picked apart online over a weekend, turning a tapestry into confetti and tossing it at a kid’s Chuck E. Cheese birthday party. Capping a hundred thousand hour output with one album that’s essentially one of silence.
We are more than Wu fans, we are believers. We argue scriptural interpretations, project meaning on Ghostface’s lyrics which may or may not be there; he’s hidden them, he’s Ghostfaced. We see what we want to see in OUATIS, since we can’t hear it. We project value or bankruptcy on it, artistically or morally or financially. Once it is finally heard, it will lose all of this, it’ll be just another Wu record. OUATIS holds weight solely through its unsealed mysteries.
OUATIS’ original intent, how it all played out, the shifting experience and consumption of music, the thing itself shrouded in mysteries — these raise bigger questions. How does this unique longeur of silence fit with all the ways we’ve made, experienced and preserved music? And a record that only exists as one copy? We forget we swim in this incredibly deep, warm sea of any music anytime, anywhere we want, but this is just a tiny fraction of music’s history.
People at the listening parties say they heard on it: thunder…bells…barking dogs…a passing mention of Tina Turner… All this makes them bearers of history, of memory, the snippets of lyrics and sounds they remember. Instead of taking music to the future, it takes it back to how it almost always was.
[-530,000 OUATIS]: (Ghost voice): NEANDERTHAL BONE FLUTE, AW SHIT, THE BITCH HAD THREE KILOS OF CZECHOSLOVAKIAN COCAINE BANANAS
Half a million years ago, we developed hyoid throat bones, which enable us to sing. Otto Jespersen posits in Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin:
Men sang out their feelings long before they were able to speak their thoughts…at first, like the singing of birds and the roaring of many animals and the crooning of babies, exclamative, not communicative — that is, they came forth from an inner craving of the individual without any thought of any fellow-creatures.
We spit bars for the self. But surely it also soothed children, made us fall in love, made the work go faster, kept it moving, baby, we keep moving. But we don’t know why; it has no evolutionary advantage. Darwin said mankind’s musical ability “must be ranked amongst the most mysterious in with which he is endowed.”
-200,000 OUATIS: Speech, and language — we sang for three hundred thousand years before we could speak. If rapping combines singing and speaking, couldn’t you argue while high that rap might have been a precursor to speech? That the first sentence was something like “and the chicken taste like wood”?
-60,000 OUATIS: Earliest discovered musical instrument, a Neanderthal bone flute. Go ahead and sample it. For 90% of the history of music, there were no beats, no accompaniment — just the voice, strictly acapella.
-3,400 OUATIS: And 94% of the time we’ve made music with instruments, it was only carried down through repetition, freestyles, tradition: hip hop has always reached into that bag, it’s always been a form of memory, echoes of earlier songs, samples, hooks, callbacks, calldowns, oral histories. It’s only in 1400BCE that we find the earliest known musical notation, on a cuneiform tablet in Babylonia.
-155 OUATIS: The first recorded music — 1860, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville records “Au Clair de la Lune:” he was looking for “a photography of sound.” Various inventors fucked around until Thomas Edison comes out with the phonograph in 1877 — for sixteen years you could record sound but you couldn’t play it back. All those experiments, OUATISs of their own: locked in paper, wax, glass. And early tin foil records could only be played once, only doubling the transience of sound.
For the first twenty-five years wax cylinders couldn’t be reproduced: studios had dozens of recorders, but songs had to be performed repeatedly to make all the cylinders — no two are really identical. Take George W. Johnson, the son of a freed slave recruited from busking at Hudson ferry terminals to cut some tunes — “The Laughing Song,” and “The Whistling Coon.” Yeah. They were big hits and sold 50,000 copies. This means Johnson was laughing and whistling the same tunes fifty times a day for years, hundreds of times, thousands of times. He was trapped in his own earworm, a minstrel monk’s mantra. An early stripmining of Black music that’s so laborious as to be torture. An opposite OUATIS: so many copies, all of them different, and the payout less than Spotify streams, no Shkrelis.
-42 OUATIS: Hip hop’s birthdate, pinned on August 11th, 1973. Across the next decade or so, the legendary park jams, and “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. For at least those six first years of hip hop, you couldn’t hear it unless you were actually there, or got a bootleg tape. These tapes aren’t archived or well-preserved; the whole early birthing is almost lost. Hip hop was originally totally ephemeral: art on a wall, on a train that got buffed. Streetcorner breaking on a cardboard box, park jams. So the underlying idea of trying to preserve one shard of hip hop, an album that’ll last 88 years: this has value.
We’ve only been able to record music for 165 years: 0.3% of the time we’ve made it with instruments, and 5% of the time we’ve been able to notate and replicate it at all. If we go all the way back, only .03% of all music has been contemporaneously recorded. We don’t know how many songs have ever been created. Estimates run at 2–5 billion, and probably 250 million recorded — 0.1%. Every song before 1860 as it was sung or played in the moment is gone forever. Every single one.
So what’s the fucking point, math boy? It’s that the desperate urge to save our brilliant musical moments, make them last: that underlies OUATIS. Almost all music ever made is defined by impermanence — a fleeting, physical experience like an orgasm, a good meal. A moment of hearing, feeling, not an intellectual one (looking, reading, following a story) — more like religion than culture. Is seeking this kind of permanence in music the pinnacle of a half-million year goal, missing the point, or futile hubris?
The 88 year silence of OUATIS, this enforced prohibition, feels staggering to us in our present day, our tiny hand-cupped lifetimes, but it’s less than a drop in all that ocean of sound. And what it was up against to put a marker down on history — to capture music, preserve it, make it last: this has taken hundreds of thousands of years.
[+88 OUATIS]: Wu-Tang Forever, Vita Brevis
RZA’s original intent was for OUATIS to tour to museums, galleries and festivals, and only then sold. Somewhere this shifted to just the auction, trying to jump the line from Discogs obi strip rare Japanese import sealed vinyl to Sotheby’s level, Uncut Gems and all that.
Why didn’t RZA just donate it to a museum? Or build his own Wu-Gallery? When you come from poverty, you don’t give things away, but he wanted to get the big payout and the acknowledgement of the lofty fine art world. But you can’t have both without that class signing on first.
If a museum had taken and exhibited OUATIS, you’d see selfies next to the glass vitrine on Instagram…over the years, pilgrims throwing up the W ever more wrinkled and grey. On Monday, October 8th 2103, will there be next generation Wu fans there for the great unveiling? Is Wu-Tang for the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren?
And who the hell will have a working CD player by then? Why wasn’t it pressed on vinyl, which has more class and prestige, and is played mechanically on a device more easily reconstructed? A vinyl record easily lasts a century. A CD might or might not.
OUATIS is not actually like a valuable painting or sculpture, except in the sense of it being a sole, unique object, in part as there’s such a difference in time taken, and the experience of looking vs. listening. It’s more like Maurizio Nannucci’s Universum Volume I & Volume II, a book bound on both sides: unopenable, unreadable, inoperable as a book just as OUATIS is inoperable as an album, beautifully packaged objects of weighty mystery.
The 88 year caesura links OUATIS to work that seeks to see time differently, confront our short lifespans. There is the Future Library, which also began in 2014: one hundred authors will write books which no one can read for one hundred years. They are held in The Silent Room, within a protected Norwegian forest whose wood will be used to print the books in 2114.
Musically, there is Longplayer, composed algorithmically for singing bowls that started playing on December 31st 1999 and will do so for one thousand years. You can visit a listening post or stream excerpts. I listen to it often. I wish Killah Priest would rap over it. There is John Cage’s “As Slow As Possible,” which began playing on an organ in a German church in 2001 and will finish in 2640. The next note change is on August 5th 2026. I’d like to be there.
These works are instinctively dizzying, confronting lengths of time far beyond what we’ll live, but also have an intrinsic optimism: that the world will still be here in one hundred, one thousand years, that there will be people left alive to read and hear them.
There are the land art works: Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” a 1,500 foot frog tongue of basalt curling from the lip of the Great Salt Lake; Walter De Maria’s four hundred steel pole “Lightning Field.” And Michael Heizer’s “City,” which took fifty years to build, a mile of minimalist monuments. All are deep in the deserts of the West, those vast dead plains of sand, linking the work to geologic and natural processes and their slow, methodical time.
All of these are OUATIS, including in their hubris, striving for permanence, and artifice of historicity — new shrines trying to be imbued with the resonance and awe generated by the ancient: Luxor, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Ozymandias type beat. A day to Allah is a thousand years.
So why isn’t OUATIS held in the same regard as these, a lofty work of Long Time art? On the one, again, RZA wanted the bag of money, and Shkreli and the NFT idiots hijacked it. The second is the same as why Rammellzee doesn’t get retrospectives at Guggenheim Bilbao: it’s Black art, it’s street-born art, it’s hip hop. Think differently: the response and acclaim heaped if OUATIS had been gimmicked up by, say, David Bowie or The Mars Volta. Artforum would jizz their pants.
But both with OUATIS and some of these works, the egocentricity, exclusivity and cost has a lingering sense of [makes jerkoff gesture]. Who the fuck do you think you are, grasping to be beheld a thousand, ten thousand years hence? The odor of a ridiculous testament to a ridiculous ego, like both the movie and the city of Coppola’s Megalopolis. Like the ludicrous Saudi futuristic city The Line — a single mirrored building in the Neom desert, 110 miles long and 500 feet wide, for nine million people, with a 300mph monorail, AI bullshit and drones and whatever, costing a trillion dollars. Concept art bullshit from a bad movie laden with cheap CGI about a high-tech-utopia-that-immediately-becomes-a-dystopia.
Yet all of these have the same desperate grasping as the dying android in Blade Runner: I WANT MORE LIFE, FUCKER!
Think about other ways RZA could have expressed his vision for legacy, the unique album, the once-in-a-lifetime experience: like if the Clan performed it only once, live — probably in that crazy Las Vegas Sphere thing, another bizarre modern monument. But this would be the opposite, something transient, unpreserved except by those lucky enough to be there, in testaments and accounts like those at the listening parties: I heard the Wu Tang record. This is what I remember.
And hip hop performed vs. recorded are two entirely different sounds and experiences; one has the adlibs and banter, the covering ODB’s verses; the other is a soundscape, an interiority where the wuxia sword clash samples and the beats and Meth’s sandpaper voice intermingle as a whole.
The real genius move would be if the record could only be played once, then self-destructed on some Mission Impossible type shit. Like William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, where tape loops play and play until they deteriorate into silence, a project by Jungian synchronicity linked eternally to 9/11: Basinski completed it that day, saw the towers fall from his rooftop. (Again: vast human monuments, and their fall, all of this on its own loop.) But Disintegration Loops was recorded, it’s preserved, you can listen to it any time.
So what about an imploding OUATIS? Who wants to be the person responsible for that? To decide who gets to listen to it with them, or alone? Maybe Marina Abramovic buys it with MacArthur Genius money and plays it in a locked, soundproof gallery with no one in it. We wait outside. Then she opens the door. We look at her face, try to read it. Maybe Mike Tyson buys it and plays it on a Brooklyn rooftop for his pigeons, on some Ghost Dog type shit. “They liked it, I think,” he says.
Or nobody buys it. No one wants that power, to destroy even the most mid Wu-Tang album. It kicks around at the back of RZA’s closet, sits on the dresser next to his weed grinder and high-end moisturizer. A bomb with an unstarted timer, a fuse with no match.
Maybe ultimately the unanswered question of OUATIS is about memory and where it resides: inside or outside us. A Better Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, creeping in this petty pace from day to day, to the last kung fu outro sample of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted Ol’ Dirty Bastard the way to dusty death.
[+20,000 OUATIS]: Hellz Wind Staff
There are dark mirrors, as-yet-unrealized flipside parallels to those works, with their intrinsic optimism of being enjoyed by far-off future generations: structures and warnings for toxic and irradiated sites. Just as all the land art and the Saudi future city, and the pyramids, are in the middle of the desert, so too are our hazardous waste depositories. The desert is the geography of long time.
Since nuclear waste will remain lethal for 10–24,000 years, how can we mark these sites with warnings that will be understood long after every living language, and maybe any civilization or science, is long gone? The oldest written tablets we have are only 5,000 years old; the oldest language still spoken is the same age. How can we ensure those explorers and excavators of the Riddley Walker ages to come don’t go looking for treasure under Chernobyl’s containment dome: it must have been important to the ancient ones, it’s a vast and durable monument?
This has been a project for decades, the Human Interference Task Force: how to overcome the cultural, tempocentric specificity of alphabets, symbols, create canticles for Liebowitzes. Some propose creating a commune nearby, where each generation would preserve and pass down the warning—as ritual, folklore, atomic priests. What better way than an eternally recurring rap joint, remixed and recited and re-sampled, “It Takes U235 (To Make Your Face Fall Off)” or “After The Radiation Comes Tears”?
Others work on warning markers, Stonehenges of negative magnetism: buried rooms, new Rosetta Stones. And the Landscape of Thorns, which sounds like a GZA joint that got lost in The Flood: forbidding thirty-foot spikes in a sixteen mile perimeter. Iron flags.
Our legacy will in part be poisonous threats, hidden darts. These are grave markers of our gravest mistakes, hell’s wind staff. Once Upon A Time in Chernobyl.
[+40,000 OUATIS]: The Sarcophagus
OUATIS isn’t a time capsule. A time capsule is a collection of a community’s messages to the future and artifacts reflecting their era — an analog time machine that freezes the moment and moves forward in real time, no DeLorean. This is who we were, this is how we lived. OUATIS doesn’t capture 2014 that way, future generations are not going to extrapolate that our ancestors had a class of warrior monks who undertook a healing ritual consisting of laying hands on something called an ‘angela basket.’
Cilvaringz said OUATIS was conceived on a journey in Egypt:
RZA and I would ride horses into the desert completely alone and have the pyramids pretty much to ourselves. Halfway climbing up the pyramids of Cheops, I said to RZA that one day we would do something special together that would last throughout the ages.
This sounds like ridiculous bullshit. But RZA said to Forbes about OUATIS: “This is like somebody having the scepter of an Egyptian king.” The overarching intention was to take the Wu logo to its logical endpoint: a hieroglyph, awaiting some cyborg Champollion of the 22nd century. OUATIS is a pyramid, a grand tomb, a majestic memorial for great monarchs. And inside, the carefully preserved remains of the dead.
The problem with OUATIS is that by the time it was made, how it was made, the Wu were way past their prime — it’s a Cumaean Sibyl, who traded some pussy to the god Apollo for immortality, but forgot to ask for eternal youth, so she just kept getting smaller and more withered until she was just a croaky voice in a jar.
An essential quality of hip hop is that its immediate drive is to escape from violent death: to leverage lyrical and musical skill as a means out of the projects, out of the way of the bullets. It’s only after that’s attained that it progresses to the ambition of all artists: to create immortal work, that will far outlast your flesh. Every painting, record, poem — all of these are personal pyramids. Art is the struggle for victory over death, but rap starts with higher, literal stakes.
The Voyager probes were launched in 1977, and are now one light day from Earth, 15 billion miles, the only human objects that have passed into interstellar space. Each carries a golden phonograph record and instructions on how to play it — eight diagrams, as it happens — ready for E.T.’s Technics 1200. (RZA had hopes OUATIS would follow: “Maybe Richard Branson will just buy it and put it on one of his planes and send it to another planet. That’d be dope!”)
The Golden Records contain 116 compressed images of where we are, our bodies, our planet, our achievements. Brainwaves, the sounds of volcanoes, wind, earthquakes, rain, thunder, crickets, heartbeats, laughter. Greetings in fifty-six languages. Ninety minutes of twenty-seven songs (none produced by Cilvaringz, which would probably kick off some Independence Day type shit.)
Music is the only human art represented here: no Mona Lisa, no Shakespeare, no Michelangelo. One of the songs is Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground.”
For all its Carl Sagan-ass, Greatest Generation/Boomer can-do hoorah Amercuh attitude, Voyager and its records are not a time capsule or a greeting card or a first contact. It’s another pyramid, launched into the unimaginable emptiness of space, the darkest of nights and coldest of grounds. Because the closest Voyager will get to another star is in 40,000 years, passing 1.6 light years away from a red dwarf that’s unlikely to support life. And Voyager is the size of a Honda Civic: are we supposed to believe Kang and Kodos are going to see this thing from nine and a half trillion miles away and just pop over and snag it? Do they even have anything like eyes, ears?
Nah son. Voyager is not for the aliens. It’s for us. It’s our intergalactic tombstone: this is who we were, these are our faces, these are our songs.
Harry Martinson’s 1956 epic poem Aniara tells the story of a colony spaceship, fleeing a nuclear-ravaged Earth for Mars. But it’s hit by an asteroid and knocked, powerless and rudderless, hurtling endlessly into the void — a little bubble in the glass of Godhead. The 8,000 passengers know they will live out their lives on the ship, no hope of rescue or reaching another planet. There is a sort of AI, the Mima, that creates a kind of virtual reality of sounds and pictures the passengers increasingly seek and take solace in: the Mima is art. But the Mima self-destructs when it receives a last transmission from Earth — white tears of the granite, a nuclear war, the planet is shattered.
Without the Mima — without art — there are orgies, dance crazes, cults, reveries of their memories of Earth and the daily wheel of a routine. Eventually, everyone dies. The spaceship just keeps going, full of corpses.
With undiminished speed to Lyre’s figure
for fifteen thousand years the spacecraft drove
like a museum filled with things and bones
and desiccated plants from Dorisgrove.
In our immense sarcophagus we lay
as on into empty seas we passed
where cosmic night, forever cleft from day,
around our grave a glass-clear silence cast.
You can listen to the Voyager record. You can stream as much of Longplayer’s thousand year song as you want. You can hear a guy playing the Neanderthal bone flute. But you can’t hear more than five minutes of OUATIS. Its unknowability is maybe its greatest power. Its glass-clear silence, a god who won’t speak to us.
It’s said that you are alive until the last person who remembers you dies. RZA could’ve put the threshold on OUATIS at 8 years for the Clan or 36 years for the chambers. But he chose 88. He knows he and every member of the Clan will be dead, everyone who remembers when 36 Chambers dropped will be dead, almost all of us alive today will be dead. But they told us years ago: Wu-Tang is forever.
What makes recorded music different from other artforms is that we hear the voices of dead as if it were the day they were alive, breathing and spitting and full of sound’s power. Listen to “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” and hear ODB as vital and wild as his flesh is cold and inert. Mo mento mo moris. These songs we’ve been making for half a million years. That’s RZArection. That’s time travel. That’s immortality and eternal life. That’s what we think about when we think about Once Upon A Time In Shaolin.
