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Fade to Black: Madison Square Garden
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Making its network window premiere on VH1, "Fade To Black" offers an intimate look at hip-hop artist Jay-Z, aka Shawn Carter, that reveals the multiple Grammy Award winning artist as never before. From his background and rise to fame to the recording of his last album, the film chronicles the legendary concert of Jay-Z's performance at Madison Square Garden in November 2003. In an unprecedented event, a hip-hop artist sold out an arena in only two hours. The event was a spectacular culmination of Jay-Z's recording career prior to his self-proclaimed retirement from solo performing. Yet this one night ... defined a musical generation, showcasing the evolution and reach of the world's most popular music genre. Viewers get the rare glimpse of Jay-Z's creative process as he searches for inspiration, poetry, and perfection in his songs.
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Jay-Z might be the greatest lyricist in hip-hop, but to watch him in the enlightening new concert documentary ''Fade to Black," you'd never know he's a star. His face has about two expressions (rapping and not rapping). His long body does not dance. In certain T-shirts, his torso goes on forever, and nothing ever seems to get to him, not the sight of his gal-pal Beyonce, not the knowledge that the Madison Square Garden show the movie captures is supposed to be his last.
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Fade to Black is a 2004 documentary about the career of US rapper Jay-Z. Filmed around the time of The Black Album, the movie ... features many other famous names in hip hop music. This live concert at Madison Square Garden was Jay-Z's swan song, as he announced his intentions to retire from the industry.
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In "Fade to Black," the rapper Jay-Z performs his own movie-length swan song set to thumping rhythms in Madison Square Garden. When you realize he has already returned to the same stage one year later for a troubled performance - last weekend - it is hard to muster much emotion for this would-be career-capper. Its energy... is infectious just the same.
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Throughout Jay-Z's Fade to Black, the rap superstar talks about the importance of making his final album great, and about how big his November 2003 concert at Madison Square Garden needs to be. Both are profiled in the film. It would have been nice if the man they called Jigga, put a little of that focus in helping to make an absorbing chronicle of those heady times. Fade to Black, for all of the cultural hoopla involved, isn’t much different from a concert DVD with some extra footage thrown in.
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As much promotional video as concert film, "Fade to Black" is well timed to capitalize on the recent legal brouhaha involving the aborted Jay-Z/R. Kelly tour. A cinematic record of the former's celebrated "farewell" show at Madison Square Garden last year -- his retirement was obviously short-lived -- the film doesn't manage to achieve for hip-hop what the great rock concert films of the past have done for their musical genre.
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