‘The Disciple’ Gives the Mic to the Man Behind Most Infamous Album Ever

Tarik Azzougarh remembers the exact moment his life changed. He remembers who he was with, where he was, what he was doing. Most importantly, the Dutch-Moroccan rapper and producer who goes by the nom du stage Cilvaringz recalls what he was listening to: Track 8 of the Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). He and his friends were playing basketball at a nearby court in his hometown of Tilburg, the Netherlands, when a buddy who’d procured a tape of the Staten Island collective’s album popped it into a boombox and pressed play. “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta F’ Wit” came blasting out of the speakers.

The game stopped. Everyone listened. Three and half minutes later, the teenage Azzougarh announced he was going to start his own crew based on the template of the Wu. Eventually, the young man would not only meet his heroes but work with them. He’d also end up co-producing what’s arguably the single most controversial album of all time.

All of this is recounted in The Disciple, Joanna Natasegara’s documentary on Azzougarh’s rise from Wu superfan to affiliate, and the fall that resulted when what started as a possible follow-up to his 2007 solo album I slowly morphed into a full-on Wu-Tang album. It was called Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. You almost assuredly have not heard it. But you’ve definitely heard of it.

Let’s back up for a hot second. The Disciple, which premiered last night at Sundance, is designed first and foremost as a portrait of Cilvaringz, and doubles as a testament to both the lingua franca power of hip-hop and the ability of obsession to fuel four-alarm conflagrations of creative ambition. A child of Muslim immigrants who recounts being terrorized by a gleeful neighbor with an angry dog — a hate crime by any other name — when he was a kid, Azzougarh was galvanized by the sound of RZA‘s production and the way the Wu seemed to triple stack their verses with hidden meanings and in-house mythology. Along with his fellow enthusiasts Barrakjudah and Moongod Allah, a.k.a. Jeremy Waterloo, he started the group Lin Brotherz, who owed more than a small debt to Shaolin’s finest. An opportunity to see the Wu-Tang live in Amsterdam turns into a through-the-looking-glass moment when Azzougarh gets pulled onstage and spits some original rhymes, which gets him the nod to go talk to RZA. Then a melee breaks out in the club and poof, his big break is gone.

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Nevertheless, Cilvaringz persists. He travels several times to New York in the hopes of meeting his idol. He befriends both Killa Beez rapper Shabazz the Disciple and RZA’s sister. Eventually, the disciple becomes a sort of extended part of the group’s entourage, slowly moving up the inner-circle ranks while working on his music. RZA, for his part, does not see an opportunist. He viewed Azzougarh as a protégé who takes the philosophy behind the Wu-Tang’s music and outlook as an overall design for living. When Azzougarh offers to book a world tour for RZA, the two travel the globe and spread the good word. Both the Lin Brotherz’s records and Cilvaringz’s solo joint earn a lot of good will among the greater Wu community. He slowly but surely keeps passing through the 36 chambers, one by one.

That’s the first half of The Disciple, which lets you get to know Azzougarh while offering detours for USA Shaolin Temple Shi Yin Mang to wax poetic and Capadonna to visit old haunts and walk down memory lane. (He’s the only Wu member who gets real, non-archival screen time; Natasegara told Variety that she reached out to virtually everyone in the group and some declined to participate, while others didn’t reply. As for RZA, he’s an executive producer on the film.) Then Azzougarh casually mentions that he’d been listening to RZA’s old beats and started crafted instrumental tracks that harkened back to that dirty, gritty, O.G. Wu sound. He began enlisting various band members, Killa Beez MVPs and longtime Wu-adjacent collaborators to contribute verses. RZA would off the occasional notes and lots of encouragement. There was no real goal other than making great music. Maybe all of this would end up on the next Cilvaringz solo album.

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At some point, it was decided that the collection of songs would be an official Wu-Tang album. That concept alone was controversial enough among several of the Wu, who noted correctly that this was not how they had been pitched when asked to participate. Then Azzougarh came up with an even crazier idea: Music had become completely devalued in the age of endless peer-to-peer sharing sites and easily downloaded-for-free tracks. What if they made a single copy of the album, and sold it to the highest bidder? And per stipulation, it would be 88 years before any of it would be available for public listening. This would not be disposable music for the masses, dissected on social media today and virtually gone tomorrow. Imagine the Mona Lisa, but with kung-fu–flick samples and Wu-Tang Forever-era sonic palettes. This would be treated like high art. Or at the very least, a NFT on wax.

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Hardly anyone has actually heard Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, though Rolling Stone music critic Christopher Weingarten attended the one and only listening session and essentially declared that the 13-minute excerpt he heard was positively mindblowing. (Yes, this article is given the spotlight treatment in the doc. No, you will not hear any tracks in the doc.) Yet everyone has an opinion about it, given the failed experiment behind its “release.” What neither Cilvaringz nor RZA had counted on was that this made-for-the-fans throwback would send the die-hards who couldn’t hear it into a rage, or that a real-life supervillain would be the one to end up owning it. Cyrus Bozorgmehr, the larger-than-life character who helped usher the project into existence and is one of the main talking heads in the film, has already written a book about the backstory behind what happened. But The Disciple walks you through every bad decision, every bit of pharma-bro trolling by OUATIS owner Martin Shkreli and every unfortunate turn of events in a way that most will not have heard before. It gets ugly.

Worse, it ends in Azzougarh becoming the scapegoat for the whole debacle, and being labeled the Guy Who Ruined the Wu-Tang Clan’s Reputation by his fellow superfans. This back half of the movie is what’s destined to take up most of the conversational oxygen when the film eventually gets a release — it’s come to Sundance without a buyer — and while it’s a 21-sized-font footnote in Azzougarh’s story, the saga of the Great Album No One Could Hear is, in a lot of ways, the most interesting aspect of the doc. The chance to get the scoop on the scandal straight from the mouth of the man who made it, as well as his living-the-dream experience of working alongside his hero, is enough to make this required viewing for anyone interested in hip-hop legacies and fanboy fantasies made manifest. Both the album and Azzougarh get a happy ending here, even if neither of their stories are anywhere near finished. But it does succeed in setting the record straight in more ways than one.