Can street rap really raise alarm bells? Or are profit-minded artists merely preaching to the sociological choir—did you know the hood is fucked up?—while affirming and banking off conservative America's worst stereotypes? Certainly it would be difficult to suggest gangster rap tropes are winning a PR war over middle America. But at the same time, the implicit realism of Chicago's street rap scene makes armchair cynicism about its stars' motives impossible: Ballin Like I'm Kobe is no lazy b-ball double entendre, but a reference to Jacobi D. Herring, a friend of G Herbo's who was killed in 2013, and over whose tombstone he crouches on the tape's cover. Likewise, "I'm Rollin", the tape's underground smash single, opens with a roll call of lost friends, and the drug they'd do with Herb if they were here today.
That Southside-produced track comes near the tape's conclusion, and it's the most structurally compelling on the album. This isn't the kind of hit you can force; it just happens. It sounds as if it were hewn from craggy granite, each segment of the song—the beat, the backgrounds, the chorus, Herb's rapping—grinding into place, sparks flying. It takes up an aggressive amount of space, forcing listeners to open themselves to its heft and rough edges. Formally, the record is his most innovative, one which ambitiously reimagines the rules of songcraft. Thematically, it captures the strange dissonances of what's been called drill music, its heightened stakes and tragic context contrasting starkly with its artists' armored detachment.
No other song on Ballin Like I'm Kobe feels quite so one-of-a-kind. Sometimes it's pro forma; drill records like the DJ L-produced "Gang" sound as if they could have been recorded any time within the past three years. But outside of "I'm Rollin", Herbo's doesn't traffic in the kind of pioneering stylistic breakthroughs common to the first wave of drill artists—King Louie, Lil Durk, or Chief Keef. He is not drill's most versatile talent, preferring to play to his own strengths. His more traditional approach is an ability to wring narrative pathos from the song without letting his voice's cracked shell fully break. His vocal style is ragged but forceful, and in contrast with the East Coast influences to which it might be readily compared—the LOX, say—there's a sense of Herbo's words scratching past the lines, moving with a looser, less precise rhythm, as if to suggest an anxious undercurrent. And likewise, his subject matter seldom moves toward the humor of classic New York mixtape artists, preferring to shift from the autobiographical to very real-seeming threats.
There's a tendency to approach Herb—in contrast with other artists on the scene—as if he were his genre's moral conscience, the Manichean good to drill's unmitigated baseline of evil. This reduces the genre's complexity to a simplistic binary. Herb's strength is less about moralism than it is about showing a complete human being in your speakers—an honest rendering of a morally compromised soul. These are the album's best moments. There is the DJ L-produced "Eastside", with scribbled double-time verses and contradictory tones of resignation and pride. It's an approach that works similarly on opener "L's": "The shit I been through made me heartless, all my feelings on this glock." And it's readily apparent on the melancholy "Bottom of the Bottom", which frames the rapper's aggressive approach with a crying string sample, which lends an echoing power to an atypically pointed chorus: "Now the judge hang us with a hundred years, used to hang us with a tree."
