A Netflix documentary returns to one of music's strangest experiments: a Wu-Tang Clan album pressed in a single copy and sold as a unique artwork, not released as a record. The Disciple: A Wu-Tang Fable, directed by Joanna Natasegara with RZA as executive producer, centres on Tarik Azzougarh, the Dutch-Moroccan rapper-producer known as Cilvaringz, whose teenage devotion carried him into the group's extended family and into the studio. ARTnews gives it a passing grade but finds it frustrating.

Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was conceived as a protest against piracy's cheapening of music. Housed in a handcrafted silver case and previewed at MoMA PS1, it sold through Paddle8 in 2015 for a reported $2 million, barred from commercial release for 88 years though the buyer could hold listening parties. The triumph curdled when the buyer proved to be Martin Shkreli, the drug executive reviled for price rises, dividing the group; Method Man was among those angered at music being treated as something else.

The film then leaves the album alone for nearly an hour to tell Azzougarh's life story: childhood racism and abuse, the long Marrakech lunch at which he told the director the album's winding history, and teenage trips to New York that won him a place in the Killa Beez circle. The review argues nobody involved learned much from the art-world collision, noting the group's belief that exclusivity alone commands millions, with reference points seemingly limited to Leonardo, Picasso and Warhol.

After Shkreli's arrest the group explored undoing the sale, including a rumoured clause involving Bill Murray. Convicted in 2018, Shkreli saw the Justice Department sell the record toward his reparations; in 2021 it passed for around $4 million to PleasrDAO, which still holds it. The collective stages controlled listening events, from Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art to a former New York synagogue, caught between sharing the record and guarding it from ordinariness. Asked if he would do it again, RZA offers only a murmur.