Album sale gone bad could do good
On Thursday, a day after he was revealed to be the “mystery buyer” who dropped $2 million on a oneof-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album, Martin Shkreli was on Twitter, asking followers to vote on which band he should conquer next.
“Private album just for me,” he wrote. “Who’s next?”
The hypothetical options included Oasis, Radiohead, A Tribe Called Quest and David Bowie. This followed another poll that included Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Neil Young and the Smiths. In between, Shkreli observed: “You should have to take and pass a test to buy music. We don’t value artists in today’s society and the consumerism of music is destroying it.”
Since he now owns the most expensive album of all time, it was a curious statement. His unease with materialism was also odd, given the furor this fall after Shkreli’s company acquired the toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim and then jacked up the cost from $13.50 to $750 per tablet.
A price hike of 5,400 per cent for a potential lifesaver quickly turned the former hedge fund manager into “the most hated man in the world.”
Politicians and health advocates condemned him. He was called a douchebag, a sociopath, a price gouger, the embodiment of pure evil, a horrendous excuse for human life. His elfin smirk beamed from protest placards as he morphed into the poster boy for Big Pharma greed.
His shrugging defiance — his job is to maximize value for investors, he kept repeating — did little to mitigate his supervillain bona fides.
So when Bloomberg Businessweek broke the story, outing Shkreli as the owner of the Wu-Tang Clan’s now mythic Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the rap demigods must have winced and spit a few freestyle curses into their mics.
This was not the way the story was supposed to end. Charles Manson, Kim Jong Un, Bernie Madoff, David Duke, Darth Vader: all of them probably now seem like more palatable buyers of the album that took six years to make.
“I was a little worried that they were going to walk out of the deal,” Shkreli told Bloomberg. “But by then we’d closed. The whole kind of thing since then has been just kind of, ‘Well, do we want to announce it’s him? Do we not want to announce it’s him?’ I think they were trying to cover their butts a little bit.”
You can’t fault the Wu-Tang Clan for feeling mortified. Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, of which there is only one copy, is now in the hands of a reviled baron. It’s like learning someone found a Rodin sculpture and sold it to a scrapyard. The sale was so shocking that some people, including in the media, fell for a hoax this week after a prankster claimed there was a clause that allowed any member of the WuTang Clan — or Bill Murray — to steal back the album in a legal heist.
The Clan’s de facto leader, RZA, declined an interview request on Friday. But he’s previously said the sale was completed in May, before Shkreli’s “business practices came to light.” The group is also donating a “significant portion” of the proceeds to charity, which suggests it now sees the deal as radioactive.
But as easy as it is to hate Shkreli — and there truly is something about his smug resting face that triggers unrest — he also deserves credit for supporting the Wu-Tang Clan’s “unique work of art,” which itself was inspired by a drive to “restore both economic and experiential value to music.”
While a $2-million payday would drive Adele to leap from the nearest office tower, it’s the kind of money the Wu-Tang Clan hasn’t earned for a long time.
Yes, in a perfect world, the buyer would at least pretend to care more about the art (Shkreli hasn’t even listened to the album yet). But it’s not like this was a surprise auction. There were months for other buyers, including deep-pocketed hiphop stars, to gauge the artistic and cultural value of an album from rap pioneers.
But no one outbid Shkreli. And so the man who already owns the Visa card once belonging to Kurt Cobain, a man who seems to believe rare memorabilia is a way to get closer to stars such as Katy Perry, has reshaped what it means to make and own music. In an industry gasping to survive, this could be a precedent. It could forge new creative freedoms and financial alliances, especially for bands on the wrong side of the career hill.
Sometimes bad people do good things by accident. vmenon@thestar.ca