The New Wu-Tang Clan Album Comes in a Portable Speaker

Ever since their one-copy album Wu — Once Upon a Time In Shaolin, Wu-Tang Clan has been notorious for special, or can we say unusual, selling techniques. For their 20-year anniversary, the group is dropping A Better Tomorrow, their first album in seven years. However, don’t expect to find the piece at your (digital) record store. According to The Verge, the Staten Island collective has partnered with Boombotix to offer a portable speaker that has eight of the songs from the upcoming LP, along with an exclusive bonus track. The entire package will be available in November before the album is released. One-thousand units of the $79.99-priced speakers will be available through Boombotix’s site, with another 2,000 that will be sold in Zumiez stores. This requires one of its Boombot speakers, which normally just receives music over Bluetooth, to be re-engineered in order to work as a standalone portable music player. That involved adding flash memory and a file management system to store the tracks.

In a conversation with Billboard, RZA says the entire project is a dedication to the tangibility of music:

“I had the idea pop up into my head, for a while, about music being kind of disconnected to us. Of being so digitized and accessible, but yet not tangible. But this thing here, a tangible item, like your old Walkman or your old cassette, or your old record, that’s what this is bringing back.”

It will also feature all living members of the Clan:

“It’s a record to me that merges the way music was made in the classic essence, in an analog way,” he said, “as well as merging what’s going down the digital way. All the entire 10 Clan members are on it. All the [living] members, which is a beautiful thing. And the album has a small concept in a sense, musically it travels from a guy who is going through difficulties, tries to find himself, gets involved with some violence, some troubles, but then realizes that it’s best sometimes to walk away from the past and all the bad times and maybe work on making his life better, and making a better tomorrow.”

Will you be copping?