Wu-Tang Clan have announced a residency in Las Vegas slated for spring 2024.
The hip-hop veterans took to social media yesterday (December 12) to announce the residency. ‘Wu-Tang Clan: The Saga Continues… The Las Vegas Residency’ will take place at the Theater at Virgin Hotels over four dates, beginning with Super Bowl weekend on February 9 and 10, followed by another two concerts on March 22 and 23.
Are you ready? Wu-Tang Clan: The Saga Continues… The Las Vegas Residency 👐@vhlvtheater will be the home of the Wu-Tang experience starting Super Bowl weekend.
Pre-sale begins TODAY at 12pm PST. On-sale is 10am PST Friday 12/15. Pre-sale code: CREAMhttps://t.co/8us6nuevTz pic.twitter.com/y44ZvBHgrw
— Wu Tang Clan (@WuTangClan) December 12, 2023
Artist presale tickets are now available for purchase via AXS, and can be accessed using the code “CREAM”. On the other hand, general ticket sales will be released on Friday, December 15 at 10AM Pacific Standard Time (PST).
In an interview with the The New York Times, the group’s leader RZA spoke about what fans can expect from the upcoming residency. “Hip-hop is rich in its content and what it offers creatively to an audience,” he stated. “[I want] to put it on flagpoles to show that hip-hop can go where any other art form has gone before. I think the art form has evolved.”
Adding that the group intends to “add to [the] hub” of creativity in Las Vegas, he said: “I’m in that spirit of loving where there’s a hub of art and then loving that I – in my talent and the Wu-Tang brothers – can add to that hub and of course eventually invite more hip-hop artists to come and play in this sandbox with us.”
This year, New York City mayor Eric Adams named November 9 the “Wu-Tang Clan Day”, marking the 30th anniversary of the group’s iconic 1993 debut, ‘Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’. That day, the Empire State building was lit in black and yellow, the colours of their official logo.
Wu-Tang Clan’s most recent full-length album was ‘Once Upon A Time In Shaolin’, which was infamously published as a single copy in 2015, and was sold for $2million (£1.4m) to Martin Shkreli, the pharma executive who notoriously raised the price of anti-AIDS drug Daraprim in 2015 (which prompted Ghostface Killah to call Shkreli a “shithead”).
‘Once Upon A Time In Shaolin’ was never released to the public, though Shkreli played clips of the album during a livestream in 2017, despite being bound by legal restrictions which prevented the album from being reproduced for 88 years.
That same year, Shkreli was found guilty of defrauding investors in former hedge funds, for which he was sentenced to seven years in prison. Upon his incarceration, the US government confiscated the only copy of ‘Once Upon A Time In Shaolin’, and later sold it to a new owner, PleasrDAO, which purchases non-fungible tokens. In 2022, Shkreli was released early from prison and reportedly “transferred to a BOP halfway house after completing all programs that allowed for his prison sentence to be shortened”, according to his lawyer, Ben Brafman.