This morning, Turing Pharmaceuticals founder and all-around awesome guy Martin “Screw These AIDS Patients and Their Medicine” Shkreli was arrested on fraud charges. Mere days ago, Bloomberg broke the news that Shkreli was also the proud owner of the only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, an artifact so steeped in mystery and controversy that we couldn’t help but wonder: Is the $2 million album cursed? Let’s examine the evidence:
- It needed to be secured in a vault in Morocco because otherwise it would spread disease and famine all throughout the land.
- It had to be detained by airport security at JFK for three hours because its contents were a deemed a potential threat to National Security.
- It’s under the influence of some kind of wicked sorcery, hence the need for it to live in a scary-looking box designed to resemble a book of spells from the Renaissance.
- It knows math — specifically, all the different ways to count to 8. Paddle8, its seller, has the number 8 in its name. RZA says common folk have to wait until until 2103 to hear it, which is another way of telling us we need 88 years to prepare for battle because this curse is on some Lord of the Rings, biblical-level shit. No. 8 sideways looks like the symbol for infinity, which is how long it will take us to get rid of this curse.
In March, Method Man told XXL, “Fuck that album,” because he knows — as we’ve established above — that it is most definitely cursed. Oh, and did we mention the one person willing to buy it is basically a supervillain, and now it’ll likely end up in the hands of the U.S. government? So, there you have it. Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is cursed. You’ve been warned. Stay away. Now go listen to 36 Chambers and count your blessings.
