I dunno, "most important" strikes me as more accurate than "best."
idk man
Like. He could do anything. There are very few styles of rap that Lil Wayne wasn't at least "pretty fucking good" at and he was great at most of them.
And then there's stuff like "Help!" above and especially "Something You Forgot" where, with this one like it's this super emotional song that would be a highlight of anyone else's catalog and here it's just track 4 on one of the zillion excellent mixtapes he's made.
That's a pretty solid track as well, although the production lets him down—it feels hokey structurally, when the lyrics and delivery, while potent, are much more clear-eyed and self-effacing than that. I have no doubt that if I dug more into his back catalogue I'd find more to like in his work than I've previously given him credit for, but my personal pantheon, insofar as I have one, is probably a bit less straightforward. I like to be disarmed.
I actually really love that track including the beat.
Rockwilder (if that's who produced it, he usually wasn't credited due to his shitty arrangement with Cash Money) has a way of flipping total cheese into really good stuff. I also love Heart, but, I imagine I am in the minority there.
I will say the one thing Wayne doesn't have going for him is that he's never made like a big concept album. He doesn't have an Illmatic or to use a more recent example a good kid mAAd city.
I have no problem with Heart, or with flipping cheesy samples. I just take issue with the whole "full mostly unaltered song hook is the hook here" thing and how he leads into it. The verses are actually pretty neat, but the choruses aren't as sharp, if you can call them choruses? The bits where it's just that unadorned vocal hook.
I think I just prefer MCs with less conventional deliveries or more technical punch, or just more charisma. Wayne's got some excellent bars here and there from what you're posting and I can respect them, but it's not my personal style, and occasionally he steps on his own tone. Like throwing a grandiose boast or two into "Something You Forgot" where it doesn't belong.
I understand where you're coming from but here it's again helpful to remember that Lil Wayne freestyled all of his lyrics. If you ever have the time to look up a video of him recording it's actually pretty fascinating.
And I will concede that Lil Wayne isn't really good at song structure, but I've never considered that super relevant in rap.
After all his second biggest hit ("A Milli") has no chorus.
^^ I'm not blaming Wayne there so much as I'm blaming the production structurally speaking, but while I greatly respect that he's just freestyling all that there, that straying off the tone in weird ways is slightly off-putting, and being good at structure hasn't a damned thing to do with verses and choruses if you're a lyricist. You're constructing a mood, or an image, or a narrative, or portraying a stream of consciousness. Even formlessness is a form.
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I think I just prefer MCs with less conventional deliveries or more technical punch, or just more charisma. Wayne's got some excellent bars here and there from what you're posting and I can respect them, but it's not my personal style, and occasionally he steps on his own tone. Like throwing a grandiose boast or two into "Something You Forgot" where it doesn't belong.