Wu-Tang Clan show at Ryman Auditorium will bring hip-hop to country music shrine
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Wu-Tang Clan will headline Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on June 9. (Twitter)
A New York-based hip-hop group headlining at the former Nashville home of the Grand Ole Opry? It's going to happen, according to reports.
In what may rank among the most unlikely pairings in music history, Wu-Tang Clan is set to perform June 9 at the famed Ryman Auditorium, aka the “Mother Church of Country Music.”
The show's date is, coincidentally, the final day of the 2019 CMA Music Festival.
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Hip hop acts have previously stepped foot on the Ryman stage, but never as a headline act, the Tennessean of Nashville reported. Floetry and Slum Village were opening acts in 2002 and rapper Nelly shared the stage during a charity gig with the country music duo Florida Georgia Line in 2013, the report said.
Staten Island’s Wu-Tang Clan, which includes members Method Man, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, RZA, and GZA, recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of their debut album, “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Tickets for the Ryman show will go on sale Friday, Nashville's WTVF-TV reported.
The group made headlines last March after a judge ordered “Pharma Bro” Martin Shrkeli to forfeit more than $7 million in a brokerage account and personal assets, including the only existing copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s album, “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” – which Shrkeli purchased for a jaw-dropping $2 million.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The bizarre episode was parodied in a comedy sketch the following month on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” by guests Method Man and Ghostface Killah. Also booked that night, was former FBI Director James Comey, who posed for a photo with the rap icons.
The photo quickly went viral but raised a few eyebrows. Many pointed out that the FBI, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, had targeted Wu-Tang Clan as a “gang” that was supposedly “involved in the sale of drugs, illegal guns, weapons possession, murder carjackings, and other types of violent crimes,” the Daily Beast reported.