Back in the early 2010s, while Chief Keef, Lil Durk, and Lil Reese were blowing up the drill scene, something fresh was cooking in Chicago’s South Shore hood.
Enter Lil Bibby and Lil Herb (now G Herbo) – two young guns who were making waves online with their raw, unfiltered bars about life in the trenches. These Polo-rocking kids from “Terror Town” were mixing drill’s energy with Chicago’s legendary storytelling tradition.
The duo clicked at their local youth spot and dropped jaws in 2012 with “Kill Shit.” Despite Herbo being just 16 and Bibby 18, they were spitting bars way beyond their years. After Bibby’s Free Crack mixtape hit in November 2013, all eyes turned to Herb.
Come 2014, G Herbo’s Welcome To Fazoland was the most hyped Chicago drop since Chief Keef’s Finally Rich. Named after his fallen homie Faison “G-Fazo” Robinson, the tape hit DatPiff on February 17, his birthday. It painted a brutal picture of a Black teen walking the line between music dreams and street nightmares.
“It was me waking up, going on Essex [ave] and whatever happened before 3, 4pm then going to the studio, 4, 5, 6pm, until midnight,” Herbo reflected to Complex a decade later. “It’s just really me rapping about my day and what I’ve seen. Where I was musically and mentally, bro, it was just gutta and raw. I was in the street for real. It reflected who I was as a person and as an artist at the time.”
Welcome to Fazoland shook up drill music worldwide. Herb went deeper than headlines, breaking down the “why” behind the violence. Unlike Keef and Reese’s style, Herb got introspective. Tracks like “All My Niggas,” “Four Minutes of Hell,” and “Koolin” showed crazy wordplay from such a young artist and proved drill could go bar-for-bar with any genre. While OGs like Pacman and King Louie had bars too, they stayed local legends (even after Drake’s 2015 cosign). Herbo, like young Weezy, took fierce lyrics and vivid storytelling nationwide.
But behind the music was real pain.
“I probably had to bury four or five of my friends [back then] so it was a tough year, man, I’m not even gonna lie,” Herb shared. “And I was grieving and I didn’t understand grief at the moment. I didn’t understand what mental health and post-traumatic stress disorder was. I was still a kid.”
The Story of Faison
On August 10th, Jacoby “Kobe” Herron was gunned down at 4am in front of a McDonald’s near the intersection of 79th and Yates. Herb and his crew were outside a couple of blocks away celebrating Lil Bibby’s brother’s birthday when they heard the shots.
“He lived just a couple of blocks over… We heard a lot of shots go off. …When we got to the scene, I saw my homie dead,” G Herbo said in a 2015 interview with Sway Calloway.
Later that day, he arrived at the studio, got in the booth and channeled his raw emotion into “At the Light,” the chilling intro for Welcome To Fazoland.
“That was the first song I recorded since my homie passed, and I just talked about what I was feeling and what I was going through at the moment emotionally,” Herbo said. “Rap has always been a way for me to, like, articulate my feelings. Seeing one of my closest partners get murdered in front of me and trying to figure out how to navigate through life day by day because I wasn’t a stranger to death. But that was one of my best friends so it hit a little different.”
“At The Light” was a testimony of everything that was happening in Herb’s life at that moment, from losing Kobe—who he would name a mixtape after in 2015—to going back into his determination to chase his rap dreams and get rich. The eerie soundscape, provided by DJ L, who helped shape the sound of Chicago drill, encapsulates not only the urgency of that moment but also the unnerving sense of danger that comes with walking alone at ungodly hours.
“I made that beat for [Chicago rapper] Dreezy. She was in my room watching me make it and she was like, it sounds too unorthodox because I just got done watching this movie called The Day After Tomorrow and I was working on soundscapes,” DJ L said. “I had a bunch of crashes in there and I was tweakin’, doing anything in that bitch. I sent it to Herb and it went on the project. That shit sounded like somebody was gon’ die.”
What makes Welcome to Fazoland such an important album to Chicago is the lore surrounding its namesake. Ace Boogie, DJ L’s older brother, was instrumental in Herb’s career during the early days, helping connect him with the producer. He was also a close friend of G-Fazo.
“Shorty was not involved in no drug dealing, no nothing like that,” Boogie said “He was just a rough kid, and loved basketball.”
He explained that Faison was killed by a friend of his family over a dice game; Faison won and gloated over the victory, which the family friend became enraged over, leading to the altercation in 2010.
“The motherfucking nigga was on some jealous shit trying to fight him. So then when he tried to fight him, [Faison] thought he’s gonna whoop his ass and get it over with. So, when he got his ass whooped, just off [general principle], he grabbed the gun he just started shooting, man,” Boogie said. “Lil bro died at the hospital. That’s the making of Fazoland.”
Striving to make a classic mixtape
Mikkey Halsted, Herbo’s manager, was the sensei the young rapper needed at the time. Early on, he saw Herb not only as a raw, punchline-spitting youngster but a figure that could fill the void of thought-provoking and vulnerable storytelling that was not present in drill at the time. Or, as he told Complex, “I felt like [there] was a gap in that drill movement.”
The tape didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it took two years for it to come together. Part of the delay was the high expectations Halsted had for Herb. Halsted needed the album to be monumental.
“It was certain textures I needed because I wanted it to be a classic. Like, I needed that “Write Your Name,” texture on there. I needed “Momma I’m Sorry,” Halsted said. “He was still in the street, so I was telling they ass, ‘if y’all let them come to the studio and keep them off the block, we’ll have this tape out way sooner. But we’re not just we not putting it out until it’s something that we could talk about 10 years from now.’”
Because Herbo was still dabbling in the streets, Mikkey often went to extreme measures to get the young spitter in the studio.
“He was bad with phones, bro. I used to have to go on Essex (ave) and Kingston (ave) and find him every day,” Halsted said “I think me going and really putting my life on the line, all up through Terror Town every day, looking for his ass made him understand that I was serious and I was a real one.”
Part of the creating that timeless feel was expanding upon drill and finding production that was more soulful. C-Sick, who produced “Mama I’m So Sorry,” said he was channeling legendary producers like Kanye West and Just Blaze when making beats for the album.
The art of sampling, to me, is everything,” C-Sick said. “So, I was trying to incorporate it [while making it a] little bit more modern.”
Another one of the mixtape’s highest points, the somber memorial “Write Your Name,” flips The Stylistics’ “Betcha By Golly Wow.” The soulful nature of the production, combined with the passionate conviction in Herb’s delivery, makes it, to this day, one of the most memorable tracks in his catalog. On the track, he raps for his fallen friends, and it cuts deep for anyone who’s longed for the harrowing wish to talk to someone they love who is gone.
“I believe the beat was saying ‘Write your name across the sky’. Mick told me to not think too hard, ‘Talk to your fallen soldiers and the people you lost,’” Herbo said.“My first video shoot with Mick was ‘All My Niggas.’ He told me to do a mural with all my homies’ faces on there. I had 20 dead guys, so just the way that I handled myself after experiencing so much trauma, he used to want me to, talk about it and tell my story. To this day, I still perform that record when I’m doing shows,”
Many of the people Herb named in his lyrics on the mixtape and throughout his career weren’t all gang members. Some were regular people from the neighborhood who died from gun violence and other causes. For him, the intent was never to glorify dying, but to pay homage to those the community lost.
“All them niggas Herb be naming in his songs and shit, nobody was no killers and none of that shit,” Maneski, G Herbo’s best friend, told Complex. “Niggas was real people, they have kids, they’re sons to mamas. Bro was being supportive.”
Mello Buckzz, a young rapper representing the new generation of spitters from 78th and Essex, was a little girl watching from her window when Herbo and Bibby were filming the “Kill Shit” video in 2012. She recalls a time when her neighborhood was hurting from a violent period of loss from gun and gang violence.
“Around that time, we were losing a lot of people. So, it’s like Herb made the hood heal,” Mello Buckzz said “That shit was going up, so not only was we losing people, but he was making these people legends, by putting them in songs. So, it was kind of like a hood therapy.”
The Legacy of Fazoland
In the years since Fazoland, G Herbo has become one of the most successful rappers to come out of the city, building a strong catalog and earning widespread recognition as one of the best rappers in the game. He’s dropped classic freestyles and songs, helped shape flows, and probably influenced your favorite rapper more than they’d like to admit. Even as he’s technically improved as a rapper, the meteoric impact of Fazoland, in some ways, still remains as the biggest impact Herbo has had.
“Herb is the OG lyrical drill rapper. Truthfully, let’s look at it from 2014 to 2018. Who else was rapping lyrically, other than him, Lil Bibby, and maybe Young Pappy?,” DJ L said. “Then ‘18, brings the Lil Zays (Osama), Polo G, Durk was rapping more. They made lyricism important…Central Cee, Pop Smoke, they had the record-making ability, but the lyricism is Herb’s DNA. My musical stuff is unquestioned, but as far as Herb he was the catalyst for that.”
Andrew Barber, artist manager and owner and founder of the popular Chicago rap blog Fake Shore Drive, was one of Herbo’s first supporters, hosting his first performance, with Lil Baby, in Chicago back in 2013. He attests that Herbo and L combined ultimately influenced the sound of drill and was why he gained such a huge following.
“The DJ L sound ended up becoming the more dominant sound. I think that’s why they liked Herb and why Herb is so big in New York because you can tell he grew up watching Smack DVDs or watching freestyles,” Barber said “It was a very Chicago thing, what he was doing, but you could tell that he was influenced by that punchline style of rap.”
Barber added that had Welcome To Fazoland come out during the peak of today’s streaming era, Herbo would have had a gold or platinum RIAA certification sooner in his career.
“All those guys would have had plaques. Stuff goes gold and platinum so fast now, and it almost doesn’t even mean anything, right? If Herb would have gone gold, then it would have meant a lot more then,” Barber said.
In many ways, Welcome to Fazoland elevated the volatile sub-genre, helping it be taken seriously as a legitimate art form in hip-hop. No other Chicago rapper blended punchline-heavy rap, guttural war stories, and soulful production. This influence can be seen particularly in the rise of Brooklyn drill rappers—like 22Gz and Sheff G—a few years later. An argument can be made that, aside from Chief Keef, G Herbo had the biggest impact on an entire generation of young New York rappers, in much the same way that young New York spitters influenced him.
“To me, Welcome To Fazoland, was the tape that took drill to another level,” Halsted said.“[That tape] gave it a soul and gave it a heart and elevated it to more than just what drill was known for.”
For G-Herbo, the mixtape is an authentic documentation of what he, his friends, and his neighborhood were experiencing through generations of poverty and the daily struggle to rise above the violence all around him. He was the hood storyteller for his whole community.
“It was a testament to me and all my brothers and everything we experienced. I was the voice for so many people, like, for real, for real,” Herbo said.“I was the voice for multiple generations, generations, and generations of people who never were heard. I was the voice for them. That’s why my block was behind me, 100 percent.”
