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      in Television

      Jay Ellis Comes Home to Harlem

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      The “Insecure” actor goes on a walking tour of his adopted neighborhood.Jay Ellis was buying snacks at a corner bodega in Harlem when a woman in a crop top and Ray-Bans approached him. “Oh my God, I’m so happy!” she said.This was on a sticky Monday in September, halfway through a walking tour of Harlem, where Mr. Ellis had lived, on and off, in the mid-2000s, when he was a model trying to break into acting. After years of sporadic work, he landed a starring role on BET’s “The Game,” a comedy-drama set in the world of professional football, then booked the romantic lead on the HBO comedy “Insecure,” playing Lawrence, the boyfriend of the series creator Issa Rae’s Issa.At the end of the show’s first season, Issa cheats on Lawrence. Lawrence retaliates by dangling the promise of a reunion, then bedding a co-worker. Which means that attitudes toward the character — and Mr. Ellis — are pretty divisive. (“Insecure” returns for a fifth and final season on Oct. 24.)“I’m not a fan of yours,” the woman in the bodega clarified. “That payback wasn’t right. Nonetheless you’re a great actor.”Mr. Ellis, 39, favored her with his Sunday morning smile, then left with his water and unsalted cashews.A skyscraper of a man with dizzying charisma, Mr. Ellis, 6-foot-3, had overdressed for the day in jeans, a Comme des Garçons striped shirt, a slate jacket and sneakers the blinding white of new veneers. He met the tour guide, Neal Shoemaker, at the offices of Harlem Heritage Tours on Malcolm X Boulevard. Together they set off for a shambolic stroll through the neighborhood.“You may meet my mom any minute now,” Mr. Shoemaker said as he led Mr. Ellis onto the basketball court at the center of Martin Luther King Jr. Towers. Fourteen floors up, Mr. Shoemaker’s aunt waved furiously from a window. Mr. Shoemaker shouted up to her, teasingly introducing Mr. Ellis as her “new nephew.”Mr. Ellis bought some snacks at a bodega, where he was approached by fans. Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesNext, they walked through the African market near West 116th Street and past the Masjid Malcolm Shabazz, where incense clouded the late summer air and a nearby cafe advertised male enhancements and veggie burgers. Mr. Ellis had barely been back in 15 years. The burned-out brownstones had been renovated, he noted. And the police presence seemed lighter.The tour continued past Minton’s Playhouse and alongside Marcus Garvey Park, the site of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival that was chronicled in the documentary “Summer of Soul,” which Mr. Ellis had just seen. He stopped outside the house where Maya Angelou once lived, admiring the ivy that tumbled from the lintel.Throughout the walk, fans stopped Mr. Ellis for greetings and pictures — “Take it with me, not of me,” Mr. Ellis said to an excitable middle-aged woman who had halted her car just to snap him. Friends and relatives stopped Mr. Shoemaker, too, and Mr. Ellis, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and baby daughter, seemed a little jealous of the humming street life.“It’s the music mecca for Black culture,” Mr. Ellis said. “It’s the style mecca. Religiously, it’s a mecca. I come here, and I’m like, ‘Why am I living in LA.?’”Mr. Ellis plays Lawrence in “Insecure,” the boyfriend of the series creator Issa Rae, right.Merie W. Wallace/HBOMr. Ellis, the only child of an Air Force family, moved to Los Angeles just after his Harlem years. He briefly gave up on acting, then recommitted. A plucky hustle — he pretended that a casting agent had recommended him — hooked him a decent manager, and after a couple of years of acting classes, he began to book roles.None has meant as much to him as Lawrence, a character who struggles with the obligations of Black masculinity. Lawrence wasn’t supposed to make it past Season 1, but something about Mr. Ellis’s layered portrayal made him a fan favorite. And a least favorite.“I always say that if people are mad at me, if people are happy with me, if they’re sad or whatever, then I did my job,” he said. “Even if you hate Lawrence, I did my job because you felt something. I hope you love him because I love him. But I get it if you don’t.”Are Lawrence and Issa endgame? Mr. Ellis knew better than to comment. “I want both of them to be happy,” he said diplomatically. “I hope that it’s with each other.”He has already begun his post-“Insecure” career, with a starring role in “Top Gun: Maverick,” due out next year. (His character’s nickname? Payback.) He recently signed onto a romantic comedy, “Somebody I Used to Know,” and is the co-creator of the podcast “Written Off,” which features the work of formerly incarcerated authors.Mr. Ellis also has a starring role in “Top Gun: Maverick,” due out next year. Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesMr. Ellis followed Mr. Shoemaker past Dapper Dan’s atelier, into the Harlem Haberdashery and cater-corner to Harlem Shake, where Mr. Ellis would return for a post-walk burger. On 125th Street, he stopped to read the text on a monument to the politician and civil rights leader Adam Clayton Powell Jr.The tour ended at the Apollo Theater, “where stars are born, legends are made,” Mr. Shoemaker said. Mr. Ellis is already a star, but he still fantasizes about appearing in one of its amateur nights. Would he sing? Tell a joke?“All of it,” Mr. Ellis said, flashing that slow dance smile. “I’d do it all.”Mr. Shoemaker pointed to an unoccupied rectangle on the Apollo’s Walk of Fame, next to Lionel Richie. “I can see Jay Ellis right there,” he said.Mr. Ellis posed for a photo with a fan or two, including a teenager who recognized him from the thriller “Escape Room.” Then he and Mr. Shoemaker said a friendly goodbye.“Appreciate you, chief,” Mr. Ellis called as he headed back down 125th Street. “Tell your mama I’m coming, I’m hungry.” More

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      in Music

      ‘Summer of Soul’ Review: In 1969 Harlem, a Music Festival Stuns

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      Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples and others shine in a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival from Questlove.There’s no shortage of system shocks in “Summer of Soul.” This is a concert movie that basically opens with a 19-year-old, pre-imperial-era Stevie Wonder getting behind a drum kit and whomping away — sitting, standing, kicking, possessed. It’s a movie that nears its end with Nina Simone doing “Backlash Blues” in a boxing match with the keys of her piano, her hair indistinguishable from the conical art piece affixed to her head.The movie’s got Sly and the Family Stone and B.B. King and Ray Barretto and Gladys Knight & the Pips, in top, electric form. But no jolt compares to what happens in the middle of this thing, which is simply — though far from merely — footage from the 1969 edition of the Harlem Cultural Festival, footage that Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, has rescued and assembled into nearly two-hours of outrageous poignancy. It’s all been cooking before this midway moment. But it’s once you’re there, engulfed in it, that you trust Thompson’s strategy.Sometimes these archival-footage documentaries don’t know what they’ve got. The footage has been found, but the movie’s been lost. Too much cutting away from the good stuff, too much talking over images that can speak just fine for themselves, never knowing — in concert films — how to use a crowd. The haphazard discovery blots out all the delight. Not here. Here, the discovery becomes the delight. Nothing feels haphazard.After the energetic asides about Mayor John Lindsay’s earnest support of the festival and Maxwell House’s sponsorship; after an exuberant montage of the outfits and stage patter of the festival’s charismatic and, it must be said, dashing mastermind, Tony Lawrence; after a poignant, illuminating passage on the overlooked, much fretted over quintet the Fifth Dimension, Thompson plunks us down in the middle of a meaty gospel passage.The Edwin Hawkins Singers kick it off with their rendition of “Oh Happy Day,” which at the time was a massive hit. Then the Staple Singers — Pops and his daughters Cleotha, Yvonne and Mavis — come on and dress “Help Me Jesus” in rockabilly robes. Not far behind is the pulpit dervish Clara Walker, whose exhortative way with a tune doubles as furnace and fan.Now, these performances took place over six summer Sundays. So I don’t know what any particular day’s official, chronological lineup was, but Thompson and his editor, Joshua L. Pearson, have done some mighty hefty truncation. Minutes after Walker and her Gospel Redeemers, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson appears, looking as beatifically beatnik as he’d ever get. Backing him is the Breadbasket Orchestra and Choir, and he begins to tell the many Harlemites densely packed before him that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last words were to the Breadbasket’s leader, Ben Branch. King told him that he wanted him to play the gospel pillar “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” And here now to grant that wish is Mahalia Jackson, who many a time sang it at King’s request.Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson, performing at the festival, which took place over six summer Sundays.Searchlight PicturesIt’s important to note, that during this passage, Mavis Staples and Reverend Jackson have also been narrating the scene from the present. Speaking today, using her front-porch husk, Staples remembers that Mahalia Jackson, her idol, leaned over and asked for her accompaniment. Mavis Staples was around 30; Mahalia Jackson was in her late 50s and wasn’t feeling well.Staples goes first, alone and a-blast. Jackson follows her with equal force and in defiance of whatever had been ailing her. Then together — Jackson refulgent in a fuchsia gown with a gold diamond emblazoned below her bosom; Staples in something short, lacy, belted and white — they embark on the single most astounding duet I’ve ever heard, seen or felt. They share the microphone. They pass it between them. Howling, moaning, wailing, hopping, but well within the song’s generous contours and, somehow, in control of themselves. My tears weren’t jerked as I watched. The ducts simply gave way, and the mask I wore at the theater where I sat was eventually covered in runny, viscous salt.They’re singing for the festival’s attendees. They’re mourning all of the death — of leaders, of followers, of troops and civilians. They are, if you’re willing to see it this way, lamenting what is obviously a generational transition from one phase of Black political expression to another, from resolve to anger, from the grandiloquence of Jackson’s pile of hair to Staples’s blunter Afro. They are singing this cherished classic of bereavement in order to mourn the present and the past. Listening to them now, in the summer of 2021, plumb earth and scrape sky, you weep, not only for the raw beauty of their voices but because it feels as if these two instruments of God were also mourning the future.I don’t remember how long this performance lasts. It doesn’t really even have an ending, per se. It just simply concludes, with each woman heading back to Reverend Jackson, into the band. But when it’s over you don’t know what to do — well, besides never forget it. It’s an extraordinary event not just of musical history. It’s a mind-blowing moment of American history. And for five decades, the footage of it apparently just sat in a basement, waiting for someone like Thompson to give it its due.The whole movie is dues-giving. It’s true that nothing matches the high of Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples. Yet nothing that surrounds them feels puny or like an afterthought. Thompson has an assortment of people watch footage from the festival — attendees who were kids and teenagers at the time, performers who were there, folks like Sheila E., who learned her craft from some of these artists. And I was almost as devastated by the sight of Marilyn McCoo’s putting her hands to her face as she watches her younger self with the rest of the Fifth Dimension, recounting how in-between they felt as Black artists who Black people didn’t always think were Black enough. Their sound was light and round and reliant upon strings and harmonies that were commercial for 1969 but not cool. In this film, among Simone and Max Roach and Hugh Masekela, the Fifth Dimension don’t at all seem like outsiders. They seem like family.Throughout this thing, Thompson is dropping explanatory information and montages that are crosscut with more information. A passage about the national climate of ’69, for instance, is mixed in with the Chambers Brothers’ festival performance. And you’re sitting there in awe at how the film hasn’t lost you. It’s got its own rhythm. The images, the music, the news, the reminiscences, the commentary often come at you at once. And with another director what you’d be left with is noise, with mess. This is certainly where Thompson’s being a bandleader — a band-leading drummer; a band-leading drummer who D.J.s — matters. The onslaught operates differently here. The chaos is an idea.On one hand, this is just cinema. On the other, there’s something about the way that the editing keeps time with the music, the way the talking is enhancing what’s onstage rather than upstaging it. In many of these passages, facts, gyration, jive and comedy are cut across one another yet in equilibrium. So, yeah: cinema, obviously. But also something that feels rarer: syncopation.This festival took place the same summer that Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. The movie deftly accounts for the dissonance between the two events. It’s the answer to the brief, shrewd passage in Damien Chazelle’s “First Man” that intercuts the landing with Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon.” These two movies would make a searing double feature of the same moment in American progress, on the ground and up in space. Of course, it’s hard not to leave this movie fully aware that, at that point, in 1969, with the country convulsed by war, racism and Richard Nixon, the power of those artists assembled in New York right then makes a firm case that Harlem was the moon.But the movie’s sense of politics isn’t so despondent. Thompson winds things down with Sly and the Family Stone doing “Higher.” That band was male and female, Black and white — weird, rubbery, ecstatic, yet tight, hailing from no appreciable tradition, inventing one instead. It’s been more than half a century, and I still don’t know where these cats came from. They simply seem sent from an American future that no one has to mourn.Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)Rated PG-13 (some cursing and lustiness, lots of spirit catching). Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      ‘Run the World’ Is an Ode to ‘Enviable Friendships’ and Black Harlem

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      This Starz series about four women “walking into real adulthood,” as the creator described it, is broadly appealing but unmistakably based in Black women’s perspectives.For nearly three decades, Yvette Lee Bowser has created, produced and written for television shows that portray women who have what she calls “enviable female friendships.” More

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      in Theater

      National Black Theater Plans Next Act in a New Harlem High-Rise

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      The pathbreaking company plans to replace its Harlem home with a 21-story building with apartments, retail and a new theater.It was more than 50 years ago that Barbara Ann Teer rented space in a building at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem that would serve as the home of a nascent organization called National Black Theater.The theater blossomed into an important cultural anchor, presenting productions by, and about, Black Americans when their stories rarely appeared on mainstream stages, and hosting artists including Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou. When the building was destroyed in a fire in 1983, many feared that the theater was doomed, said Sade Lythcott, Teer’s daughter. But Teer had another idea: She decided to buy the damaged 64,000-square-foot building on Fifth Avenue, with a vision of revitalizing it and trying to use real estate to help pay for the theater’s work.Sade Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive, sees the development as a continuation of the plans that her mother, Barbara Ann Teer, made after founding the theater.Braylen Dion for The New York Times“She saw it as the next piece of this temple to Black liberation, which is ownership,” said Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive. “Ownership would allow the real estate to subsidize the art, which was a model that would disrupt the standard practice of nonprofit theater funding.”The move did not solve all their problems. There were struggles over the years, and a series of financial disputes that at one point left the theater on the brink of losing its home, but the work continued. Now National Black Theater is getting ready for its next act: It is replacing its longtime home with a 21-story building that will include a mix of housing, retail and, on floors three through five, a gleaming new home for the theater.Lythcott and other National Black Theater leaders see the $185 million project, and the partnership they are entering with developers, as a new chapter with the financial and institutional backing to allow them to live out the dream of Teer, who died in 2008: to nurture a space where Black artists can thrive, and the company can work to bring a deeper sense of racial justice to the American theater industry.“What we’re building today really has been informed in all ways by this blueprint that Dr. Teer put into place starting in 1968,” Lythcott said. “It feels like what our community of Black artists and the community of Harlem deserve.”To realize the development project, National Black Theater has partnered with a new real estate firm, Ray, which was founded by Dasha Zhukova, a Russian-American art collector and philanthropist. Also joining the project are the subsidized housing developer L + M, the architect Frida Escobedo, the firm Handel Architects, and the design firms working on National Black Theater’s space, Marvel, Charcoalblue, and Studio & Projects.The planning for the new development has come at a turning point in the theater world. With theaters closed for more than a year because of the pandemic, many institutions have been called on to turn inward and interrogate their own histories of racism and inequity, with many prominent voices calling for change when theaters reopen. It is the kind of discussion National Black Theater has been involved in for decades. This year Lythcott has advised Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on reopening the arts and, as chair for the Coalition of Theaters of Color, has spoken up about racial justice in arts budget negotiations.Before they decided to work together, Lythcott and Zhukova had to have a frank conversation early on about a high-profile misstep in Zhukova’s past.On Martin Luther King’s Birthday in 2014, an online fashion magazine published a photo of Zhukova sitting on a chair — designed by the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard — that was constructed from a cushion arranged atop a sculpture of a partially clothed Black woman laying on her back, in some sort of bondage. Zhukova apologized for the photo, saying that using this artwork in a photo shoot was regrettable, “as it took the artwork totally out of its intended context.”Lythcott learned of this photo just before she met Zhukova for dinner for the first time — in fact she was Googling Zhukova on her phone at the restaurant before they met to discuss the development project. At the dinner, Zhukova brought up the incident first, Lythcott said, explaining that she would understand if the episode cast too much of a shadow on the project. But Lythcott wasn’t fazed by it, she said, because it was clear all that Zhukova had learned from the incident.“Perhaps that chair was the best thing that ever happened to Dasha,” Lythcott said, “because it was catalytic in expanding the lens by which she sees the world.”In an email, Zhukova said that she was “deeply sorry” for the photo and said that it had started her on a “journey of continued learning and education.”“I am so grateful that Sade sees the person I am trying to be on my continued journey toward personal growth,” she wrote.Barbara Ann Teer, center foreground, founder of National Black Theater, with the cast of one of her productions in 1970.via National Black Theater ArchivesThe new building being planned, for 2033 Fifth Avenue, is slated to include 222 units of housing, an event space and a communal living room where people might eat, work and hang out; a news release says “amenities will include health and wellness programming.”The development project is more than a decade in the making, with several false starts. Lythcott and her brother — Michael Lythcott, who is the chair of the National Black Theater’s board — see it as a realization of their mother’s dream, while recognizing that she might not have taken some of the paths they chose.“She never would have partnered with someone like Ray; she never would have had financing from Goldman Sachs,” Michael Lythcott said, noting that Teer had wanted full control over the building, and preferred to keep involvement limited to those inside the community.But it is all a means to an end that their mother energetically championed throughout her life: an “ecosystem by which Black people in particular are full-throated, full-voiced, fully rooted in their own liberation,” Sade Lythcott said.By the time construction starts this fall, theater in New York is likely to be back in full force. While the new building is going up, National Black Theater will use the Apollo Theater’s office space and two of its performance spaces. And by the time construction is slated to end, in spring 2024, National Black Theater leaders hope that the space will become a place to convene, both for art and the kind of community interaction that was sorely missed over the past year.“In the wake of this pandemic,” said Jonathan McCrory, National Black Theater’s executive artistic director, “there’s going to be a kind of psychic grief that is going to need to have a healing center.” More

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      in Music

      5 Things to Do on Memorial Day Weekend

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      Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and in person in New York City.Art & MuseumsExpressions of FreedomZaq Landsberg’s “Reclining Liberty” will be on view in Morningside Park until April.Zaq LandsbergIn 2005, Zaq Landsberg created a new nation in rural Utah called Zaqistan, on the premise that our ideals around governance were worth re-evaluating. In Harlem’s Morningside Park, his yearlong installation “Reclining Liberty” — a 25-foot-long Buddha-like version of the Statue of Liberty — is another re-examination, this time of a quintessential American symbol. More

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      in Music

      How a Times Team Captured the Sound of a Harlem Gospel Choir

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      What does a socially distant gospel choir sound like? Here’s how Times journalists and technologists put users inside the sanctuary of a church in Harlem.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In March 2020, one of the earliest coronavirus superspreader events in the United States occurred when a church choir in Washington State met for a rehearsal. Of the 61 singers who attended, 53 developed symptoms of Covid-19. Soon after, congregations around the country held what would be their last in-house services of the year.Tariro Mzezewa, a New York Times reporter, talked to churches recently to learn how they had adapted. “My favorite part of going to church as a kid was the music and the sense of community,” she said. “I wanted to know how the pandemic changed that.”Some churches had a soloist sing from home during live-streamed services. Others created small pods of a few singers that performed from an empty sanctuary. Some had choir members spread out in the pews or the balcony.Churches are built for their acoustics, so when Tariro told our Narrative Projects team about these socially distant choirs, we wondered: What does that sound like? Three months later, we’ve created a special feature to give you a feel for that sensory experience.As a visual editor at the Times, I work on innovative journalism, joining with colleagues to leverage new technologies like augmented reality, photogrammetry, 3-D modelingand visualization and volumetric video (moving 3-D images of real people, like a hologram). One of the best parts of my job is the thrill I get from trying new things.For the past year, we have been experimenting with a technology called environmental photogrammetry, with which we can build photorealistic 3-D models of a room or a neighborhood.We wanted to transport our readers into a church to hear the new sound of these choirs. With the help of Bethel Gospel Assembly in Harlem, we built a 3-D model of its sanctuary and embedded 3-D audio in it, something we’ve never done before for the Times website.Times journalists and technologists spent two days at the church in April. They used lasers and sensors to measure the size of the room and the distance between all the objects in it. They also took more than 7,000 photographs, many of them using a drone inside the sanctuary (with the church’s blessing) to capture images of the upper reaches of the balcony and ceiling. That data was combined using photogrammetry software to produce the 3-D model in this interactive article.With 31 microphones, two mixing boards and a sea of cables, our team recorded a live rehearsal with a small group of singers, a band and Bethel’s leader, Bishop Carlton T. Brown. Using binaural audio, which replicates the acoustics of the human ear, we created a 3-D audio experience meant to mimic what it sounds like in that room.“You really get a sense of the energy and how important the live part of making music is,” said Jon Cohrs, a technical producer on The Times’s research and development team and an audio engineer. In the two days he spent at Bethel, Jon witnessed the camaraderie and connection among choir members. “It’s really special, and you can see how impactful it is for everybody involved.”The music you hear in the opening of the interactive feature is captured from two microphones in the back of the church, as if you were sitting in the pews hearing the voices reverberate through the cavernous space. You can move through the space in the 3-D experience, and the sound changes as you get closer to the stage and fly over the instruments.Working on this project over the past few months, I’ve spent many minutes a day listening to the ethereal music we recorded, often with my eyes closed, my mind floating somewhere between my home office in Brooklyn and that sanctuary in Harlem.Our reporting affirmed why so many churches went to great lengths to bring music to their communities during times of hardship. Again and again, pastors, congregants and choir members told us that church without music was never an option. Music is healing, they said, and it brings people together in a shared spiritual and cultural experience, even when we have to be physically apart.As part of her research, Tariro attended an Easter Sunday service at Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem, which is now allowing a small number of parishioners to attend in person. “There was a real sense of people sighing in relief, like, ‘We made it,’” she said. “A year ago they didn’t know if they’d make it.” More

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      Black Rob, Rapper Known for His Hit Single ‘Whoa!,’ Dies at 52

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      A star for Bad Boy Records after the Notorious B.I.G.’s death, the rapper had a husky, seen-it-all voice even as a young man.Robert Ross, the rapper known as Black Rob, whose husky, seen-it-all voice powered turn-of-the-millennium hits like “Whoa!” and “Can I Live” for Bad Boy Records, died on Saturday at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. He was 52.The cause was cardiac arrest, said Mark Curry, a friend and one-time Bad Boy artist, who added that Mr. Ross had numerous health issues in recent years, including diabetes, lupus, kidney failure and multiple strokes.Mr. Ross had been undergoing dialysis and was discharged from Piedmont Atlanta Hospital this month, Mr. Curry said. In a video that was posted online and spread across the hip-hop world, Mr. Ross detailed his ailments and recent struggles with homelessness.“He didn’t have a home, but he always had us,” said Mr. Curry, who called Mr. Ross “a true poet.” He added: “He’s known for telling stories and his music described his life. You can feel it.”Last week, Mr. Curry, along with the producer Mike Zombie, began promoting a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for Mr. Ross — “to help him find a home, pay for medical help and stability during these trying times,” the campaign’s description said. The fund-raiser collected about half of its $50,000 goal.Mr. Ross, who was born in Harlem, N.Y., began rapping around the age of 11, influenced by local artists like Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, whom he credited for helping to develop his storytelling prowess. He also internalized the essence of his musically ascendant neighborhood, citing its “pick-me-up kinda sound.”“It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s got a little flavor, I could dance to this’ — you’re gonna talk about a little bit of money, a little bit of drugs,” Mr. Ross said in a 2013 interview. “We were the flashiest.”Best known for the hard-hitting 2000 single “Whoa!”, which reached No. 43 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a string of electric guest verses on songs by Mase, 112 and Total, Mr. Ross could sound both motivated and weathered even as a young man.Thrust into more of a leading role after the murder of his Bad Boy label mate, the Notorious B.I.G., in March 1997, the rapper became another fast-burning star under the imprimatur of the budding hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, better known as Diddy, by the end of the 1990s.Mr. Ross’s debut album, the fittingly named “Life Story,” was released by Bad Boy in 2000, when he was 31. Already, he had spent more than a decade of his life in and out of juvenile detention, jail and prison, and the music reflected that.“It’s hell,” the rapper said at the time of his past. “Once they get their teeth on you, they keep biting, until they feel like, ‘Let’s throw away the key on this cat.’”“Life Story” featured intricate street tales of stickups, shootouts and the family struggles that could lead to such things, and it reached No. 3 on the Billboard album chart, eventually becoming platinum.Five years later, “The Black Rob Report,” the rapper’s second album, failed to find the same success, in part because Mr. Ross was back in prison, having failed to report to sentencing for a 2004 larceny charge. His career never recovered.“Bad Boy left me for dead,” Mr. Ross said upon his release from prison in 2010. Two subsequent independent releases on different labels foundered.Mr. Ross is survived by his mother, Cynthia; four siblings; nine children; and five grandchildren.Many people on social media offered condolences for Mr. Ross, including Diddy, the entrepreneur Daymond John and the rappers Missy Elliott, L.L. Cool J, GZA and Styles P.On Twitter, L.L. Cool J described Mr. Ross as a storyteller, gentleman and an M.C.Ms. Elliott lamented that the death of Mr. Ross closely followed that of another New York rapper, Earl Simmons, known as DMX, who died this month.“It’s hard finding the words to say when someone passes away,” Ms. Elliott said on Twitter. “I am Praying for both of their families for healing.” More