On the brand-new Ballin Like I’m Kobe east-side MC G Herbo, formerly known as Lil Herb, repeats the acronym “NLMB.” As he told radio personality and rap reporter Sway Calloway earlier this year NLMB stands for “Never Leave My Brothers,” the 19-year-old rapper’s collective of close friends. NLMB has acted like a shield for the violence that’s responsible for the Terror Town, the stigmal nickname given to a patch of South Shore, Herb’s neighborhood. Herb told Sway that NLMB isn’t a gang, but a stabilizing presence among the chaotic violence: “I consider us a family at the end of the day.”
To the outside community Herring was a number: he was one of hundreds on a police “heat list”; one of many killed in a year when homicides were at a low but still exceeded 400 individuals murdered. Herring’s death elicited just two paragraphs in the Sun-Times‘s comprehensive Homicide Watch, and his name was spelled incorrectly—it still reads “Jacoby Herron” instead of “Jacobi Herring.” But for Herb and his friends Herring was so much more. With Ballin Like I’m Kobe the rapper provides his friend with a name and stature society could not, and helps us understand Herb’s grief.
