By Brandon Harris

The inner workings of Staten Island’s Wu-Tang Clan––the iconic rap music collective that, for three decades, has cultivated a rabid, wide ranging fanbase––and the story of the world’s most notoriously unavailable album come into focus in The Disciple, a slick, surprisingly mournful documentary that premiered recently at Sundance.

Even as none of the members participated in the making of the documentary, we get intimate access to their working methods, mythology and internecine conflicts in Joanna Natasegara’s documentary, which focuses not on the group itself but Cilveringz, a man whose name sounds like a discarded Marvel villain but whose reality is far more relatable. He is the Wu-Tang obsessive who charmed and befriended RZA, was allowed into their inner circle and eventually convinced Wu-Tang’s centrifugal member to treat their latest hip-hop album like a Renaissance fresco, resulting in the creation of the most famously unavailable album of all time: Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.

Born Tarik Azzougarh to Dutch-Moroccan parents, Cinveringz sits for several interviews in the film but he remains a bit of a cypher. He is candid about his desperate super fandom and the odd set of circumstances that saw his induction into the RZA’s inner sanctum––The Abbott bringing a disciple into the fold––as well as his own work as an artist and producer before the subsequent six-year gestation of a Shaolin that was designed, from its first recorded bar, to be an object of singular, unrepeatable scarcity and one that he compiled using clips being sent by the various members without their full knowledge of what he was up to.

If Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction withers the "aura" of art, Cilveringz attempted to build a double-CD rap album by his childhood heroes that could only be consumed the way one does a Rauschenberg or a Vermeer.

Natasegara’s movie is filled out with copious archival of other members, especially RZA and Method Man, both of whom offer their perspective on events, but the movie belongs to Cilveringz and the circus that unfolded once Once Upon a Time in Shaolin sought a buyer. The documentary’s second act details how Martin Shkreli, the disgraced Pharma Bro who personifies the predatory intersection of late-stage capitalism and internet troll culture, bought the album for $2 million in 2015. 

Soon the "most hated man in America" for helping to artificially inflate drug prices, Shkreli refused to allow access to the album despite the desire by RZA and others for him, especially in light of his increasingly toxic public reputation as he was charged with securities fraud, to create some access for the public. Instead, he largely treated the secret recordings of Raekwon and Ghostface Killah like a trophy earned from a hostile takeover.

Things turned stranger as the U.S. Government, amidst Shkreli’s bankruptcy, seized the album following his securities fraud conviction, a flickering moment of catharsis. But the film quickly pivots to the current owners: PleasrDAO, a crypto-collective that purchased the work from the feds for $4 million in 2021 and clearly sees their occasional listening parties and happenings as a positive denouement. (Just last week Shkreli filed a counterclaim in federal court in New York against RZA, Cinveringz, and PleasrDAO claiming that RZA and Cinveringz interfered with his copyright interests.)

In the days after seeing the film, I found myself struggling with this, circling the same drain as the film’s subjects: What does it mean for Black art to be liberated from a pharmaceutical tyrant only to be "democratized" by a secretive techno-utopian outfit?

The film includes snippets of a video interview Method Man gave Huff Post online a decade ago, in the immediate aftermath of the album’s sale to Shkreli. In the portions included in the movie, it’s clearly a wound that still hasn’t fully healed, but watching the full interview later is instructive. Meth made clear that the album’s premise—one physical copy, sold into private hands with an 88-year commercial embargo—was never how he or most of the Wu-Tang Clan understood what they were recording. In his telling, they were simply paid to lay down verses, unaware that those sessions would be stitched into a single, hermetically sealed “Wu-Tang album” and marketed as a sort of sonic relic.

Despite not being involved in its completion, Method Man’s issue isn’t with the music; on the contrary, it represents a rare artifact from masters of the form, even if he claims they may have been “more artistic” had they understood Cilverringz intentions. It’s the mechanics of the album’s release that felt divorced from the communal ethos that built Wu-Tang’s legacy. The movie never really asks for its protagonist to be accountable for championing the idea without fully briefing the group, but also doesn’t quite grapple with the grim irony that bubbles up from underneath its legitimately fascinating true story of art, commerce and fandom; Hip-hop has always been the most effective vehicle for laundering capitalist fantasies into the Black community. It turned the hustle into a liturgy.

But in the case of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the hustle has become so abstracted that the music itself has literally vanished. Hope you enjoy that five-minute leak on YouTube or caught Shkreli livestream the album on Twitter, illegally, from a copy he clearly made when it was in his greedy hands. It remains singularly infuriating that the album isn’t more widely available. While sympathetic to the experiment in irreproducibility, a form that was born of live dance, scratch, beatmaking, call-and-response at Bronx house parties, night clubs and concert halls deserves more encounters with gathered humans, even in spaces where they might use devices to record it.

The Wu-Tang Clan assuredly owes us nothing, and the odd way in which the album was compiled leaves one wondering if it could possibly measure up to the group’s masterpieces Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) or Wu-Tang Forever. We may never know the answer. But the film’s downer climax suggests that this is the final evolution of the form. After Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the album of a popular artist is no longer just a collection of songs; it is a potential financial instrument, a "defiled commodity" that represents the total surrender of art to the ledger.