Herbert Randall Wright III sat in a Chicago cypher at sixteen, rapping with a hunger that made older heads turn. He was not yet G Herbo, just a kid from the South Side who had already left Hyde Park Academy High School behind. Within a few years that kid would be on a track with fifty million YouTube views, and the city's biggest rap export would call him the future. But before any of that, there was a dead friend and a mixtape named after a place that never really existed. G Herbo was born on October 8, 1995.
Fazon Robinson and the first mixtape
The friend was Fazon Robinson, one of the first young men killed by gun violence in Chicago. When the sixteen-year-old signed to Machine Entertainment Group in 2011, the city was already turning drill music into a national news story, and death was not an abstract idea. His debut mixtape Welcome to Fazoland arrived in 2014 and named an imagined territory after Robinson, turning grief into a map. The tape made him known, but it also fixed his name to loss.
His debut mixtape Welcome to Fazoland arrived in 2014 and named an imagined territory after Robinson, turning grief into a map.
He had help getting there. Lil Bibby was the close friend and early collaborator who shared those first blows with him, and their song Kill Sh*t became the entry point: over fifty million views on YouTube. Drake, the Canadian rapper, called the pair the future. By the time XXL put G Herbo in its Freshman Class, the climb looked clean from outside, but the music stayed hard, rooted in the gangsta rap, drill and trap sounds from his city.
Rebranding as G Herbo
What came next was a rebrand and a bigger stage. In 2015 he dropped the old name Lil Herb and became G Herbo, signing with Cinematic Music Group just as Ballin Like I'm Kobe, a mixtape named for another dead friend, was winning critics over. Two years later his first studio album, Humble Beast, landed to strong notices, and by 2018 he had a joint deal with Epic Records for Swervo, a full collaboration with producer Southside.
The numbers finally caught up with the reputation in 2020. PTSD, his third album, came out with guests like Lil Durk, Chance the Rapper and Juice Wrld, and it opened at seven on the Billboard 200. That title was not decoration: community trauma and complex post-traumatic stress were things he said he carried himself. The album's success made him a top-ten artist, which made the federal charges filed that same year land even harder.
Federal fraud charges and guilty plea
Those charges accused him and several others of using stolen identities to fund private jets, villas in Jamaica and designer puppies, with the fraud allegedly running into the millions from 2016 onward. G Herbo eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and making false statements, then agreed to pay a fine of one hundred and forty thousand dollars. The case could have sunk him, but by then he was also working the other side of the street.
In Chicago he had already helped rebuild Anthony Overton Elementary School, aiming to outfit the building so young people could become musicians rather than statistics. Later came Swervin' Through Stress, a twelve-week program giving Black youth access to therapy for mental health. He said he did not want to be the guy with every resource to change his neighbourhood and his city's young people and do nothing with it.
G Herbo turns thirty-one this October. He has gone from a teenager rapping about dead friends to an artist with a top-ten album, a federal conviction and a community wellness program all on his record. The name changed from Lil Herb, but the city that made him never left the frame. Welcome to Fazoland was a place built from grief; what he built after it was meant to last.