Https://Www.Bloomberg.Com/News/Features/2017-09-14/Martin-Shkreli-S-2-Million-Wu-Tang-Album-Might-Not-Be-A-Wu-Tang-Album


Martin Shkreli’s $2 Million Wu-Tang Album Might Not Be a Wu-Tang Album
Was a man convicted of fraud misled about the most expensive record ever sold?


By Devin Leonard and Annmarie Hordern

September 14, 2017, 2:43 PM EDT

The rapper Killa Sin didn’t think he was contributing verses to a Wu-Tang Clan record a few years ago when he stood before a microphone in a hotel room in Staten Island, N.Y. A Moroccan producer known as Cilvaringz had flown in for the sessions because Killa Sin, whose real name is Jeryl Grant, was barred from travel by the terms of his parole.

Like any good clan, Wu-Tang is a network that extends from core members to bit players; it can be hard for outsiders to say with complete confidence who’s in or out at any time. Killa Sin is a gifted lyricist with a different crew, Killarmy, which is part of the Wu-Tang’s extended “family,” but as he understood it, the work he was doing with Cilvaringz wasn’t an official Wu-Tang project.

“The way he presented it,” Killa Sin says of his recording with Cilvaringz, “was it was going to be basically his album, and he wanted me to do some work for him.” He later learned his verses ended up on the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the most expensive record ever sold. Virtually nobody has heard the entire recording, perhaps not even the jailed executive who owns the only copy in existence.

Martin Shkreli, who became notorious as the boyish Pharma Bro after he raised the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent, paid $2 million in a 2015 auction for the album. He owns the rights to do anything he pleases with it, except sell copies. But interviews with rappers and managers involved in the recording raise questions about its provenance and value: Is Once Upon a Time in Shaolin a true Wu-Tang Clan album? Or did Shkreli pay lavishly for the work of a little-known producer with a peripheral link to the storied rap group?

Shkreli, who currently faces a prison sentence for fraud, may himself have been played.

The 34-year-old founder of the pharmaceutical company Turing Pharmaceuticals, Shkreli took possession of the 31-track double CD and its ornate, hand-carved box around the time he became a public pariah for raising the price on an antiparasitic pill called Daraprim from $13.50 to $750. He would later be convicted in August of defrauding investors, a consequence of his previous incarnation as a hedge fund manager. While awaiting sentencing in that case, he managed to get into more trouble: A federal judge on Wednesdayrevoked Shkreli’s bail after he offered his Facebook followers $5,000 for a lock of Hillary Clinton’s hair.

Now, as Shkreli sits in a federal jail in Brooklyn, the fate of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin appears to be up in the air again. Shkreli posted the one-and-only copy to EBay last week, and the online auction for the record is scheduled to end Friday night. “I have not carefully listened to the album,” Shkreli wrote in his description of the auction.

Killa Sin isn’t the only person involved in the mysterious, years-long production of the record who doesn’t see it as a Wu-Tang project. Two charter members of the rap group, through their managers, also described it as an undertaking of Tarik Azzougarh, the real name of Cilvaringz.

“It’s not an authorized Wu-Tang Clan album,” says Domingo Neris, the manager of the rapper U-God, a charter member of the Clan. “It never was.”

“When we did the verses, it was for a Cilvaringz album,” says James Ellis, manager of Method Man, another core member of the group. “How it became a Wu-Tang album from there? We have no knowledge of that.”

Cilvaringz chose not to respond in detail to questions about the record’s genesis. “The album and its concept were an evolutionary process that spanned six years, too complex to explain in a soundbite,” he said in a statement. “All participating Wu-Tang artists were paid in advance while RZA and I bore the financial risk of the project.”

Shkreli also declined to discuss Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. He responded to an email earlier this week with “hahahahahahahahahahahaha” before castigating Bloomberg LP, which publishes financial data and news. “Bloomberg is an overpriced, legacy software system that subsidizes a money-losing media company,” Shkreli wrote. “This state of affairs will soon change.”

The accounts of Killa Sin and the representatives of U-God and Method Man echo a tale circulating on hip-hop websites: Once Upon a Time in Shaolin began as an undertaking by Cilvaringz, who later persuaded RZA, the de facto leader of the Wu-Tang Clan, to endorse the project and make the record more valuable. (RZA and his representatives did not respond to interview requests.)

This differs from the story given by RZA and Cilvaringz when they were auctioning the album through Paddle8, an online auction startup. The two men, who were identified during the auction as co-producers, described the album as an effort by the entire Clan to restore the value of music at a time when listeners can download almost any release without paying. They said members recorded their parts separately and that only the two producers had heard the entire finished product.

“The album was recorded in secret with the members not knowing the exact outcome,” RZA said in March 2015. “But when we announced it to them that this was the plan, everybody agreed that this was a very unique idea.”

Neris, who manages U-God, says the real story is that Cilvaringz gathered verses over the years from Clan members for his own projects and later stitched them together to make Once Upon a Time in Shaolin without the full group’s permission. “We’re very detailed about the quality and how we put our best foot forward,” Neris says. “We would never have authorized anyone to put together a project and call it a Wu-Tang Clan record without us ever looking at it, hearing it, or being in the same room together. That’s just the way these guys work.”

U-God sued Wu-Tang Productions Inc. and RZA in New York State Supreme Court last year, saying he hadn’t been paid for his work on Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, among other things. His manager says that case is pending.

The rapper Shyheim Franklin, another member of the extended Wu-Tang network whose work has been praised by Jay-Z, tells a similar story. He says he went into a studio on Staten Island with Cilvaringz about five years ago to add verses to one of the producer’s records. “He did mention it being a project he was trying to produce with everyone on it,” Franklin says. “There wasn’t the assumption that it would be a Wu-Tang album.”

Franklin, whose name is on a track list for Once Upon a Time in Shaolin that has circulated online, says he can’t be sure he’s on the record but he’d like to find out. “I’d like my cut of that $2 million,” Franklin says by telephone from Washington Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he’s serving a maximum sentence of 14 years for second-degree manslaughter.

He also wouldn’t mind having a conversation with Shkreli: “Tell him there is an unreleased Shyheim album he can buy if he wants,” Franklin says, laughing.

For Killa Sin, the experience has been particularly disheartening. He says he had been off the scene for a while and was looking for a way to get back in front of the public. He had previously worked with Cilvaringz, a RZA protégé, and liked his style. When he complained about the low fee Cilvaringz offered, the response underscored that this wasn’t a project affiliated with one of the most beloved rap groups. “He said, ‘I’m doing this all out of my pocket, and I don’t have a big budget,’” Killa Sin recalls.

Killa Sin says he pressed Cilvaringz to let him hear some of the record so he could write better verses and immediately recognized old friends from the Wu-Tang Clan such as Raekwon and Inspectah Deck. “Of course,” he says, “I’ve been associated with those guys for the better part of 20 years.” He figured the Cilvaringz album would be a good one and he’d have more chances to reco

But in 2015, Killa Sin was convicted of criminal weapons possession and received a 16-years-to-life sentence. He’s currently at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y. Later that same year, RZA and Cilvaringz sold Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to Shkreli, who has kept the album under wraps for the most part, although he did play some of it online after the election of Donald Trump.

In a telephone call from prison, Killa Sin laments that he wasted his verses on an album that may never be heard by Wu-Tang Clan fans. He also resents the way Cilvaringz treated him and the rest of the Clan members and their affiliates.

“It’s an insult,” Killa Sin says. “It’s like f--- everybody else. I’m going to get mine. He probably thought, ‘We’re onto something. We can really get some money for this.’ But you got to stop and say, ‘How would my brothers feel?’”

Among Wu-Tang fans, there’s also been the perception of insult around the album—only it’s Shkreli who supposedly denigrated the rap group by withholding the music from the public and using his control over the album to draw attention to himself. A potential juror dismissed from Shkreli’s fraud trial articulated this view. “Your Honor, totally he is guilty and in no way can I let him slide out of anything,” explained Juror No. 59, according to a court transcript. After the judge dismissed the candidate, Juror No. 59 added: “And he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan.”

Shkreli used the EBay auction for Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to express his own hurt feelings at being misunderstood. His purchase was intended to be “a gift to the Wu-Tang Clan,” he wrote. “he world at large failed to see my purpose of putting a serious value behind music. I will be curious to see if the world values music nearly as much as I have.”

The highest bid so far: $1,006,400.


----------------=


https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2017/09/15/why-once-upon-a-time-in-shaolin-is-a-wu-tang-album/#1b314fc8729e

Alas, Martin Shkreli Did Buy A Real Wu-Tang Album


Zack O'Malley Greenburg , FORBES STAFF


As much as we'd all like to believe that disgraced pharma bro Martin Shkreli has been duped, he hasn't.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton may only agree on one thing: that Martin Shkreli is despicable. Two years ago, after the former pharma executive raised the price of a drug used to treat infections in AIDS patients by 5,000%, Clinton fumed about his "price-gouging," while Trump dubbed his actions "disgusting." Shkreli's stench crossed oceans: the BBC called him "the most hated man in America."

People love to hate on Shkreli--currently in jail after violating his bail on a fraud conviction for publicly offering $5,000 for a strand of Clinton's hair--and rightly so. That's probably why a Bloomberg story suggesting that the erstwhile executive was duped intospending $2 million for the Wu-Tang Clan's secret album, The Wu ... Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, has been getting so much traction this week. The piece, while deeply reported and elegantly written, revolves around a three-year-old argument that the record is not actually a Wu-Tang record. It is, by any reasonable definition. But first, let's back up a bit.

In 2014, Forbes first broke the news of the Wu-Tang Clan's secret album. Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, produced by Wu affiliate Tarik "Cilvaringz" Azzougarh and championed by group ringleader Robert "RZA" Diggs, had been produced in Morocco with new verses from the group's original members and was sitting in a safe, awaiting purchase. There was a catch: the album would only be sold to a single buyer who would be contractually unable to release it to the public.


“We’re about to sell an album like nobody else sold it before,” said RZA, the first Wu-Tang member to speak on record about Once Upon A Time In Shaolin. “We’re about to put out a piece of art like nobody else has done in the history of music. We’re making a single-sale collector’s item. This is like somebody having the scepter of an Egyptian king."

In the two years that followed, RZA spoke frequently of his plan to use the album as a way to reestablish the value of recorded music, placing it on the same level as the fine arts. He wanted to bring back the model of wealthy patrons hiring musicians to create one-of-a-kind works--and move toward a world where the priciest albums could rival the most expensive paintings. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, and in 2016 the album was sold to a wealthy pharmaceutical executive for $2 million. The problem: it was Shrkeli. RZA and Cilvaringz either realized too late, or simply didn't care, about his odious track record. And when faced with a backlash over the news, they announced they'd donate a portion of the proceeds to charity.

From the beginning of the process, though, many Wu-Tang fans were understandably incensed about Once Upon A Time In Shaolin. They hated the idea that their favorite group would create an album that wasn't for them, and many of them began trashing Cilvaringz on the web soon after the news broke in 2014. Some suggested that, because he wasn't a charter member of the Wu-Tang Clan, the record was a fraud. His diplomaticresponse: "People are responding to it in a very interesting way ... and it's starting the things we wanted to start: debates."

Cilvaringz's involvement in the album, and his status with the group, wasn't some big secret. A simple web search reveals the nine members of Wu-Tang, and he clearly isn't one of them. So to say that Shkreli was "misled" is, well, misleading. The debates were out there in the open, and Shkreli, with even a few minutes of due diligence, should have been able to catch himself up on the debate.

That aside, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin bears all the markings of a Wu-Tang album. As one of the few people who's heard several minutes of it, I can say with certainty that it sounds like a Wu-Tang album, bringing all the vivid urgency of 1990s New York into your eardrums. It looks like a Wu-Tang album, with the group's cherished--and undoubtedly legally protected--logo on its handcrafted silver-and-nickel cover. And, most importantly of all, it features the group's original members, championed most prominently by RZA, the man who molded Wu-Tang from a loose confederation of (mostly) Staten Island rappers into an official group.

---------------------=


Http://Start.Att.Net/News/Read/Category/News/Article/Page_six-Is_martin_shkrelis_2_million_wutang_clan_album_a_f-Rnypost

Is Martin Shkreli’s $2 Million Wu-Tang Clan Album A Fake?

News 14 Hours Ago Page Six — Laura Italiano

Notorious “Pharma Bro” and convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli may have himself been defrauded — when he shelled out $2 million for the only copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s “secret” collector’s album last year,Bloomberg reports.

The one-of-a-kind, 21-track double-CD — titled “Once Upon A Time in Shaolin” — was made by “a little-known producer with a peripheral link to the storied rap group,” Bloomberg said after on-the-record interviews with a trio of artists and managers connected to the project.

The three say artists who rapped for the album — some as long as five years ago — never knew they were working for Wu-Tang at the time and never authorized it being used on the album.

They dismiss the producer who put it together, Tarik Azzougarh, aka “Cilvaringz,” as a newcomer to Wu-Tang.

Artists were told that their recordings would be “for a Cilvaringz album,” said one of the managers, James Ellis, who reps core Wu-Tanger Method Man.

“How it became a Wu-Tang album from there? We have no knowledge of that,” Ellis said.

The three men are also disgruntled over never having heard the album in its entirety and not knowing to what extent their work is on it — and whether they should be compensated with a chunk of Shkreli’s $2 million.

“It’s not an authorized Wu-Tang Clan album,” said Domingo Neris, who reps charter Wu-Tang rapper U-God.

“We’re very detailed about the quality and how we put our best foot forward,” Neris said.

“We would never have authorized anyone to put together a project and call it a Wu-Tang Clan record without us ever looking at it, hearing it, or being in the same room together,” Neris said.

“That’s just the way these guys work.”

Bloomberg reached out to Shkreli for comment on whether he thought he’d been conned into buying a less-than-genuine Wu-Tang album.

He emailed in response, “hahahahahahahahahahahaha.

“Bloomberg is an overpriced, legacy software system that subsidizes a money-losing media company,” added Shkreli, who since that response has been ordered held in federal lockup pending his January sentencing date.

It’s unclear what impact his status as a guest of Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center will have on his own ongoing auction of the album on ebay. Posted for auction two weeks ago, bidding had topped out this week at $1,006,600.

Speculation over the legitimacy of the album has swirled among Wu-Tang fans since founding member RZA announced in 2014 that it would be filled with never-before-heard verses from original members — and that only a single copy would be auctioned at a starting price of $1 million.

Fans were angry that they couldn’t hear the music themselves — and then became incensed when it was purchased by Shkreli, the former drug company exec who’s widely derided for hiking the price of an AIDS drug by 5,000 percent.

But in an opinion piece published Friday on Forbes.com, staffer Zack O’Malley Greenburg points out that everyone — Shkreli included — knew all along that the album’s producer, Cilvaringz, was not a founding Wu-Tang member.

The album is genuinely the work of Wu-Tang founding members, regardless of what they are saying now about the recording and producing process, he argues.

“As one of the few people who’s heard several minutes of it, I can say with certainty that it sounds like a Wu-Tang album, bringing all the vivid urgency of 1990s New York into your eardrums,” he writes.