On Nov. 24, 2015, Wu-Tang Clan tried to rewrite the rules of music (yes, again). Instead of dropping their long-gestating 31-track double album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin like everyone else, they pressed a single physical copy and decided to auction it off like a rare piece of fine art . Fans pictured Quentin Tarantino bidding, or a museum treating it as a landmark in hip-hop history . Instead, the winner was Martin Shkreli — the pharmaceutical executive who became public enemy No. 1 after raising the price of an essential AIDS drug from $13.50 to $750 per pill .

The moment the buyer was revealed, Wu-Tang’s art experiment stopped being a heady statement about music ownership and instantly became a cultural lightning strike . What should’ve been a radical celebration of hip-

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