I just listened to Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. As music, it’s good. As art, it’s truly great

This waiver I’m signing says it is binding until the day I die or the year 2103 – whichever comes first. I’ll be 112 years old in 2103 or (more likely) very dead. Who knows if anyone will still be talking about Wu-Tang Clan then, or what state Once Upon a Time in Shaolin will even be in by 2103. The album exists in a sole physical copy and that’s a CD – will any one other than antique dealers even have CD players then? In any case, I’ll make sure not to slip up at age 111.

I must sign (and I’m rigorously frisked) to ensure I have no plans to make a covert recording of what happens next, as I enter Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art. This is where Once Upon a Time in Shaolin will be for the next week as part of the gallery’s new exhibition, Namedropping, examining status, celebrity, scarcity and notoriety. Once Upon a Time in Shaolin fulfils on all counts: a never-before released album by a generational-defining group, that exists as a single copy in an ornate silver box and sold for millions. About 9% of the 500 people who will get to hear it at Mona are travelling from overseas; the gallery closed the waiting list when it reached 5,000 people.

Related: Martin Shkreli accused of copying one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album

When Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was announced in 2015, it came with a unique stipulation: whoever bought it would not be able to release it for 88 years, or 2103. At the time, Wu-Tang Clan’s leader, RZA, called it a “big picture” statement on how music was undervalued, saying: “Limiting the album to one copy will not immediately reattach value to all recorded music, but the debate that our approach has sparked might eventually lead to a change in the perception, value and appreciation of music as a work of art and that is why we feel the sacrifice is worth it.”

Other Wu-Tang members didn’t agree – Method Man called the 88-year rule “stupid” – but, a decade on, it’d be hard to argue RZA was wrong. We now all understand that streaming leaves musicians with crumbs. And Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is undeniably a work of art.

And, like most art, it ended up in the hands of a rich guy. Martin Shkreli, the notorious “pharma bro”, paid US$2m for Shaolin at its 2016 auction, telling a journalist: “There’s a lot of things rich guys do to show off. The press thing is a part of it, but it’s also to show your friends, or your last company, like, ‘Hey, fuck you, look at me, I got this $2m album.’ Guys do that all the time.”

Just a couple years later, Shkreli forfeited it to the feds after being convicted of securities fraud, which allowed PleasrDAO, an NFT collective, to buy it for US$4.75m in 2021, with the promise that it would find a way to share the music with the world. Which is how I ended up getting to hear it.

Which brings us to: the music. About 30 of us are ushered into Mona’s recording studio, called the Frying Pan, where the sound of heavy rain thunders through the speakers. We are offered green tea. A PlayStation 1 sits in the middle of a table, solemnly symbolic: a music industry guy whisper-explains to me that PS1s are considered audiophile-grade CD players. We are about to hear a 30-minute mix put together especially for Mona by the Wu-Tang producer Cilvaringz.

“You ready for this?” a Mona employee says, and hits start on the controller.

Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is not as thrillingly in your face as the 1993 debut Enter the Wu-Tang, but it is easily as good as 1997’s Wu-Tang Forever. It is also far more polished than both, and sounds great for it. There are all the hallmarks of the Wu-Tang sound: kung fu films, swords clashing, gunfire, police sirens. But there are also grand string sections, bombastic horns, even an electronic organ. It sounds different to any other Wu-Tang album but also reassuringly familiar. As always, they’re self-aggrandising, filthy, funny: “I jerked off the sun like the day was mine” is one lyric that makes me choke on my tea.

It is hard to tell how many of the double album’s 31 tracks we hear, but two stand out: Inspectah Deck rapping to a completely infectious Morricone beat and an energetic Redman track with spirited horn section. All the living members, to my ear, are on the 30-minute mix, which ends with a plaintive chant for the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard: “I wish Dirty was here.”

So as Wu-Tang Clan music goes, it’s good. But as a work of art, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is truly great. For much of the session, most people have their eyes closed, entirely focused on what they are hearing in that moment. It is such a stark contrast to how music is mostly listened to these days; a kind of muzak for our stressed brains, a means to block out the world around us. Albums have been filleted into singles, singles scattered among playlists. I think of RZA’s manifesto, of all the monumental talent that fed into what we were hearing and I get it: yes, music does deserve better.

When the mix finishes we’re all completely silent; it takes a Mona employee raising his eyebrows for us to remember where we are, to applaud while he ceremoniously deposits the CD in a safe, flanked by two security guards. As we file out I speak to a couple of Wu-Tang fans, who travelled from mainland Australia just for this. One young guy looks as though he’s been belted over the head, visibly buzzing with pleasure. Another man, older, is melancholic. “It actually made me feel a bit sad,” he says. “To know we will never hear it again.”

Well, maybe. Shkreli, now out of prison, livestreamed tracks from the album on X days ago, just before Mona’s first listening party. PleasrDAO is now suing him, with a Brooklyn judge putting a temporary ban on Shrkeli streaming or disseminating any copies he made of the album. PleasrDAO have since released a five-minute sample of the album online as a NFT, which you can buy, right now, for US$1. The Wu-Tang Clan profits from the NFTs, which goes some way to explain why this is allowed.

Each purchase brings the album’s release date forward by 88 seconds. It’d take $28m to unlock it tomorrow. For the fans, I hope it comes out before I am 112. But the selfish part of me, the part that felt completely transformed by this as a work of art, secretly hopes we all wait.