Quest to listen to only copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s heretofore secret new album, The Wu–Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, takes Forbes senior editor to Morocco.
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* FORBES first broke news of secret album in late March, and since then, Wu-Tang’s search for a buyer has begun in earnest. The aforementioned box has been moved from a vault in the shadow of Atlas Mountains to the Mansour for extra security. In the latest step toward unveiling Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, [producer] Cilvaringz invited us to Morocco to be the first civilians to hear part of the album—and to debut an exclusive snippet on Forbes.com. *
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Zack O’Malley Greenburg Senior Editor, Music and Entertainment, Forbes
Zack O’Malley Greenburg
Forbes
May 6, 2014
Walking west from the center of the centuries-old Jemaa El Fna square in Marrakesh, Morocco, the crowds start to thin as the snake charmers and spice merchants give way to modern boulevards clogged with old Mercedes taxis, fume-spewing mopeds and the occasional donkey. The Royal Mansour hotel rises in the distance—a destination packed with wares rarer than any in the old market—in particular, the hand-carved, silver-and-nickel box that will soon contain the only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s new album, The Wu – Once Upon A Time In Shaolin. You’ll find a cobblestone street across Avenue Mohammed V, protected by red-and-white sawhorses and a security hut manned around the clock. A few hundred feet beyond, past a clutch of idling Range Rovers and a stand of palm trees helicoptered in from as far away as the ancient city of Fes, a cedar-and-metal gate large enough to fit the fuselage of a jumbo jet guards the Mansour’s front entrance. […]
Hand-carved box with only copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s new album.
It’s hard to imagine a more regal place for the vessel set to contain Wu-Tang’s album as it awaits its next move. “We’ve very lucky to be able to hide it here, away from prying eyes,” says the creator of the box, a British-Moroccan artist known by the mononym Yahya, who has been exhibiting some of his other works at the Mansour. “Now we’ve opened it up … we have to find someone else to hide it. Despite everybody thinking that this is some great publicity stunt or marketing ploy, this has been a genuine concept from the get-go,” adds Tarik “Cilvaringz” Azzougarh, the album’s producer. “It happened to get a lot of publicity—great—but it is a genuine concept with a genuine core and a genuine goal.”
Click here to listen to our 51-second clip of the album
FORBES first broke the news of the secret album in late March, and since then, Wu-Tang’s search for a buyer has begun in earnest. The aforementioned box has been moved from a vault in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains to the Mansour for extra security. In the latest step toward unveiling Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, Cilvaringz invited us to Morocco to be the first civilians to hear part of the album—and to debut an exclusive snippet on Forbes.com. Flying more than 3,500 miles from New York to Casablanca for less than a minute of music may seem a bit extravagant. Renting a car and braving Moroccan traffic for 150 additional miles (with a malfunctioning GPS unit, no less) may have been unwise. But there’s more to it than just the audio: the Wu-Tang story has become one of the biggest of the year in the entertainment business. The group’s decision to release just one copy of the record sparked debates in the music industry that spilled from that first FORBES article into Billboard and Rolling Stone, then to mainstream outlets like Time and Fox News, and all around the globe via publications from Der Spiegel to the New Zealand Herald. Even billionaire Richard Branson weighed in (“I take my hat off to them for a really fun idea,” the Virgin Records founder explained in an interview at Kasbah Tamadot, his own Moroccan hideaway).
[Continue Reading at Forbes…]
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