Lil Wayne reveals his top rap songs of all time
Lil Wayne has been cited as an inspiration to so many rappers who came after him, but he, too, has his own hip-hop idols that he looks up to.
On a short video on YouTube, Wayne can be heard reflecting on his all-time favourite rap songs—and first up is Dipset founder Cam’ron. Wayne loves Cam’ron’s song ‘Oh Boy,’ a Grammy-nominated single lifted from his third solo album Come Home with Me, which came out in 2002.
The Just Blaze-produced ‘Oh Boy’ was a success for Cam’ron, topping the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles chart for five weeks in a row in the US and even reaching number four on the broader pop charts. Wayne absolutely loved it when it came out, so much so that he used its instrumental on his SQ1 mixtape released that same year.
Of the original ‘Oh Boy,’ Wayne said in the short, “I became the boy because of that song. That song wasn’t a song, it was a lifestyle.”
The next track that Wayne spoke about was one of Jay-Z’s, which featured on his second album, In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, from 1997. The song is ‘Lucky Me,’ and, as Wayne revealed during a conversation with Rolling Stone in 2020, he loved it so much that he got some of the lyrics tattooed on his body.
“Jay was talking so crazy on there,” Wayne enthused. “He went bananas on that album. I got lyrics from that album tattooed on me. That album stuck with me for real.”
Wayne went on in that YouTube short to talk about Missy Elliott, who had a song on her fourth album, 2002’s Under Construction, that he loved. “Missy had this joint,” he said. “It was number nine on her shit. And she just went bananas.”
The ninth track of Under Construction is one called ‘Slide,’ and, to be fair, it packs a punch. The production is fairly filthy, and Missy’s flow is “bananas,” as Wayne put it.
The last track that Wayne mentioned in the clip was ‘Goodie Bag,’ a track from Goodie Mob’s debut album Soul Food. Goodie Mob was CeeLo Green’s group that formed in 1991, and, indeed, Cee-Lo’s verse stood out to Wayne in particular, as he started reciting its opening on the spot. “First of all,” he recalls, “I stand a little more than five feet tall.”