On the second half of Strictly 4 My Fans, when G Herbo’s longtime collaborator Lil Bibby shows up for the record’s sole collaboration, the headliner is having a crisis of confidence. He’s tired of clutching a pistol handle every time he turns a corner; he says his mother’s tired of wondering if he’s alive or not. And when the exhaustion really sets in, he turns back to a recurring nightmare: his face on the evening news under reports that he’s been gunned down, “no gun on me—so that means I lied in all them fucking rhymes.” By the time Bibby takes his turn, he’s mulling a move down south to cheaper real estate and quieter evenings. “I was always silent/Grew up violent, adapted to my climate.”
While that sort of bone-deep fatigue is the emotional throughline for many of Herbo’s best songs, Strictly 4 My Fans is anything but perfunctory. If anything, he sounds reenergized, like he’s been caged up for too long. And he has plenty to say—the tape opens with a furious take on the election, made all the more foreboding when the tape dropped a few weeks too late: “‘What if Fred Hampton was president?’ I woke up praying that/Because if Trump become the president he might bring slavery back/Been on black folks eighty years—might as well bring Reagan back.”
Whether he’s processing CNN tickers or drifting up and down Essex, Herbo has a gift for describing rapid change. On “Gutta,” he raps “These little niggas dangerous/Don’t even mask up no more, these little niggas brainless”—a notably weary point of view for someone who was born in 1995. Rappers from Chicago are far too often poked and prodded through sociological lenses, but with Herbo there’s something fundamental and cross-generational, a furious, unmoored delivery that always seems to be swimming upstream against the quickening decay of a country.
Strictly 4 My Fans is constructed strangely, in that it puts two mid-tempo sex songs back-to-back, right in the middle of the sequence. (The closest parallel in recent memory is probably the one-two punch of “Do It To Ya” and “Me & My Bitch” on YG’s My Krazy Life, though that suite was designed to serve a narrative purpose on a concept album.) Fortunately, each is well-produced (by Kid Marquis, flipping a Silk sample, and Charlie Handsome, respectively), and the momentum doesn’t ebb too much. “Pull Up” also features hands-down the record’s funniest moment, when Herbo opens the song “Let me show you how the gangstas do it/I know you tryna get it on, turn the Bryson Tiller off and let me fuck you to this gangsta music.”
More than last year’s Ballin’ Like I’m Kobe or Herbo’s breakthrough Welcome to Fazoland, this record relies on warm soul tones, including those approximated by 1980s gloss. And while he remains one of the best mechanical rappers working today, there’s rarely a moment here where Herbo sounds as if he’s breaking new formal ground. Strictly 4 My Fans is not an experiment or a leap forward. What it does provide is another fourth-quarter dose of rap’s youngest old man, a wizened 21-year-old who sounds, for the third year running, like he’s on the cusp of something truly great.