Once Upon a Time in Shaolin: The Untold Story of the Wu Tang Clan's Million-Dollar Secret Album, the Devaluation of Music, and America's New Public Enemy No. 1
by Cyrus Bozorgmehr
Reviewing Once Upon a Time in Shaolin: The Untold Story of the Wu Tang Clan’s Million-Dollar Secret Album, the Devaluation of Music, and America’s New Public Enemy No. 1 is like trying to retell a story of improbable events that happened to your friend; unless your audience knows the subject of your story, all the twists and turns will fall flat. But if you’re listening to a wild ride narrated by the person to whom they happened, strap in: it’s good even without context.
I fit well into the no-context category. I mean, everyone that went to High School at the turn of the millennium had Gravel Pit—Napster-compressed and burned on a cd-r that skipped forward 20 seconds whenever their car hit a pothole—on loop. But beyond that, my exposure to Wu ended at Ghostface Killah, my friend’s car that was so named after a frosty winter night Pollocked a 2-liter of Pepsi across the inner lining of the roof. It created a haunted pareidolia. And it was a white car. And he was the source of my bootleg bombastic beats—coincidence? No, that dude dug the Wu.
I can sit here and retell this book’s story: RZA makes a hidden Wu album and a donk finance scammer buys it, and then he somehow goes to jail for crimes of being a donk. But I may as well be recapping a Scooby Doo episode. “Yeah, and then the ghost chases them off-screen, and then, when them come back, they’re chasing the ghost.”
Cool.
And I have no personal hook to the tale: you’ve already heard the best bit (it’s the car with the ghost face stain). Yet I still loved it! Why? The panache. The verve. The style. You need to read the words as presented. There’s a part where the author talks about Adele being “the real deal” and a three-dimensional person rather than the managed contrivance typical of a pop star. And I feel that, but for this author. He’s a full, complete person, not simply a narrator pushing you from one story hit to the next, recapping something interesting that happened to him. No, he’s the interesting one. And the stuff—which was interesting, don’t get me wrong—could have been anything! Imagine caring about paragraphs that described the logistical problems of getting giant speakers delivered to an office building. Freight elevators. Scheduling. Dimensions. It is the Office Space TPS reports. Except, somehow, good.
The writing is absurd to the point of poetic; once, the term “due diligence” was misused—my lawyer-brain sent out warning signals—but “...the due the extremely diligent” is such a fucking beautiful recapitulation of the phrase that it tattooed itself upon my beating heart. I am not exaggerating when I say I would consider myself successful as a writer if I turn a garbage-nothing clichéd phrase like “due diligence” into idiosyncratic flow with half the zest as a cool quarter of the sentences in this book. Have you ever been on the bus or the street or the subway and overheard a conversation where the cadence or maybe the speaker’s voice is so enthralling that you just kind of zone out, listening to someone you don’t know talk about something you don’t understand, and you’re hearing the words without actually eavesdropping the details? If not, I am sad for you. If so, that’s Once Upon a Time. It’s soothing, while still being exciting. Won’t change your life. Doesn’t need to.
Read the book. I know that’s the conclusion for about half my reviews, but what else can I do when a book deserves it? Once Upon a Time resists retelling, summarizing, gist-ing. It’s fun in a way I cannot point to another non-fiction and say, “Yeah, like that.”
It’s not like that. It’s like it’s own thing. And unlike the secret album, this is available to you, right now.