(Photo Credit: Marv Watson)
As if there wasn’t enough music associated with this toxic election, there is now supposed to be new Wu-Tang Clan music coming out at the price of a Trump presidency. With the press and majority of political pundits anticipating the President Elect of the United States to be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, it seemed reasonable to ex-pharmaceutical CEO and current supervillain Martin Shkreli to bet his exclusive ownership of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the long sought-after LP from Wu-Tang Clan.
Earlier this year, Shkreli purchased the only available copy of the Clan’s latest album at a steep price of $2 million. But in late October, Shkreli took a gamble, making a tweet announcing that he will be releasing his entire unreleased music collection, including Nirvana, Beatles, and Wu-Tang, for free. After last night’s election, Shkreli seemed to make good on his promise.
Late last night, Shkreli livestreamed himself playing a portion of the record. “I’ve got to decide how to put out — there’s about 30, 35 tracks,” he said during the clip. “I actually have a contract with the Wu-Tang Clan where I’m not allowed to do this. Obviously, I own the music and I bought it and paid a lot of money for it. In many ways, the contract shouldn’t matter that much. But I am a man of my word; I had to play a little bit of it…but I’ve got to keep my word to them, too.”
Shkreli became known by many as the bane of the pharmaceutical industry and general standards of decency when the company he founded, Turing Pharmaceuticals, acquired the drug Daraprim and jacked up the price by 5,000 percent. At the moment, he is on bail after being arrested by the FBI and indicted for securities fraud last December.
Interestingly, Wednesday is the 23rd anniversary of the release of the Wu-Tang Clan’s critically acclaimed debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).
Check out a video of the livestream below.
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