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The DAO of Wu
How a secret Wu-Tang Clan album sewed the philosophical seeds of the NFT movement.
“A lot of things in life are temporary, fleeting, impermanent. But remember this — just like our blockchain, Wu-Tang is forever.”
Jamie Johnson, PleasrDAO
This space truly never ceases to amaze me, and I believe the story of the secret Wu-Tang Clan album will be one that historians recall with a much deeper appreciation than it’s been getting in real time.
The concept of things being owned by a widely dispersed group of individuals who agree to follow a set of rules enshrined in computer code (a DAO) is still brand new. But a couple months ago, one of the more high profile ones did a $4 million deal with the US government.
I think it’s safe to say, these things aren’t going anywhere.
The Wu
Before we get too deep into the DAO side of things, first we must understand the Wu.
Back in 2015, the Wu-Tang Clan announced that they had secretly recorded an album featuring every artist in the group (except ODB, who passed away in 2004). The album took seven years to produce, contained 31 tracks and would be entitled, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
Instead of releasing the album like normal, they held an auction where only one single copy of the record was sold.
The concept of putting a single copy of something on auction was obviously not new. Its standard practice in the art world with rare paintings and sculptures. And it happens every day on eBay.
But this was the first time the “frame” of rare art had been applied to a freshly minted rap album. Records like this are typically released in a pretty formulaic way. They get a few spins on the radio for some hype, they get released on streaming services where the artist makes a tiny fraction of a percent on each stream, and the music pretty quickly finds its way to YouTube or other platforms where people listen for free and the artist makes nothing.
It has been my experience as an artist that the commercial value of creative output in our society is generally pretty low, except for in a precious few contexts where it is astronomically high.
