Top 100 Lil Wayne Songs (According to COMPLEX Magazine)

In celebration of Wayne's homecoming, Complex Mag released their top 100 songs by our beloved Wayne. (Read the full article here) Though we at Y.O.Y.O. don't totally agree with their choices (of course we have our own favorites :-] ), it's a well composed article and we thought our readers might be interested in the top 10 songs!

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 THE TOP TEN

10. Lil Wayne "Dough Is What We Got"
Year: 2007
Produced By: Just Blaze
Album: Da Drought 3
Label: N/A

Continuing in his long tradition of borrowing instrumentals from the other Mr. Carter, Weezy swiped Jay-Z's comeback-single-cum-Budweiser-commercial for "Dough Is What We Got." Wayne hit the track with twice the energy of Old Man Jay but remained deferent to his legacy saying, "I must be Lebron James if he's Jordan." He then reconsidered the analogy—"No, I want rings for my performance/I'm more Kobe Bryant of an artist."

9. B.G. f/ Lil Wayne, Juvenile, Turk, and Mannie Fresh "Bling Bling"
Year: 1999
Produced By: Mannie Fresh
Album: Chopper City In The Ghetto
Label: Cash Money/Universal

Rakim once boasted that he could take a phrase that's rarely heard and make it a daily word. Perhaps no act of rapping better illustrates this phenomenon than "Bling Bling." Wayne only provides the chorus, leaving the verses to his Hot Boy brethren, but he stole the show with only two words. Eleven years later the word "bling" is completely played out, the exclusive domain of ironic talk show hosts and soccer moms, but its resonance is undeniable. It's even earned an entry in the Merriam Webster Dictionary.

8. Lil Wayne "I Feel Like Dying"
Year: 2007
Produced By: Jim Jonsin
Album: Tha Carter III Sessions
Label: N/A

Though drug use might be responsible for some of Weezy's odder and sloppier late career decisions, it also brought out the best of him on some occasions. "I Feel Dying" is Wayne floating at a delightfully psychedelic pitch, diving into Codeine seas over Jonsin's ethereal beat. The track never saw a proper release, but it still brought about a bevy of legal troubles, including a suit from South African songstress Karma-Ann Swanepoel, whose "Once" is sampled on the hook and a subsequent case in which Wayne's camp sued Jonsin for not properly revealing the sample.

7. Lil Wayne & Birdman "Stuntin' Like My Daddy"
Year: 2006
Produced By: T-Mix
Album: Like Father, Like Son
Label: Cash Money/Universal

Forever father and son, Baby and Wayne have a complex relationship. One that the rest of the world might not ever truly understand. Let's just leave it at that and let them continue to make hits. "Stuntin' Like My Daddy" is just that and feels like a bit of a call back to the label's late-’90s days, complete with a tag team chorus and some throwback "Pwweenn on the Yahama" vocal effects courtesy of Weezy.

6. Lil Wayne "Tha Block Is Hot"
Year: 1999
Produced By: Mannie Fresh
Album: Tha Block Is Hot
Label: Cash Money/Universal

Riding Cash Money's hot streak, Wayne's debut solo single, "Tha Block Is Hot," was a giant step for the then-17-year-old. It introduced the world to Wayne as not just a tiny hypeman for Juvenile, but as a lively and entertaining standalone force. He splatters his still-tightening double-time flow and cartoony vocal effects all over Mannie's impending track.

5. DJ Khaled "We Takin' Over"
Year: 2007
Produced By: Danja
Album: We Da Best
Label: Terror Squad/Koch

With some very phoned-in appearances from T.I., Fat Joe and Rick Ross, "We Takin' Over" could very well have been yet another generic entry in what would eventually become an endless series of completely boring Khaled-helmed posse cuts...if it wasn't for Wayne. After a brief but effective setup by Birdman, Weezy seizes control of the track for his unforgettable cleanup verse: "I am the beast/Feed me rappers or feed me beats/I'm untamed I need a leash /I'm insane I need a shrink." And if that wasn't enough to claim the beat as his own, he revisited it on his Da Drought 3 tape with a sprawling new verse in which he handles the recently broken Birdman-kissing scandal in the swiftest way possible—with an admission: "Damn right I kissed my Daddy/I think they pissed at how rich my Daddy is."

4. Lil Wayne "Sky's The Limit Freestyle"
Year: 2007
Produced By: Myke Diesel
Album: Da Drought 3
Label: N/A

Wayne always had an unparalleled skill for claiming instrumentals as his own. On mixtapes he wasn't just rapping to beats or rewording hooks—he was building full songs. There might be no better example of this than "Sky Is The Limit," which swipes its beat from Mike Jones' slightly creepy would-be comeback single "Mr. Jones." If you don't remember that song, you're not alone; nobody does. Mr. Jones himself probably can't even hum the hook today. But Wayne saw the potential in Myke Disel's track and restructured it into this bizarre and prideful anthem. He flies in the sky with fishes and swims in the ocean with pigeons. It's aspirational eccentricity. Also, when he was 5, his favorite movie was the Gremlins. That ain't got !! to do with this, but it was an interesting side note worth mentioning.

3. Lil Wayne f/ Static Major "Lollipop"
Year: 2008
Produced By: Jim Jonsin
Album: Carter 3
Label: Cash Money/Universal

Love it or hate it, "Lollipop" is Wayne fully unhinged, yet somehow able to fit into a pop song formula. It's one of the strangest and most abrasive ballads to ever hit the airwaves, with all empty space and drug addled Auto-Tune mumbles. That it's Wayne's biggest hit is an oddly appropriate contradiction. Here is a scrappy troll of a gangsta rapper turned into a secks icon, singing passionately with a singing voice that would be atrocious had it landed in anyone else's body. But he sells it on presence and persona. And, yes, today you aren't going to ride around with your homies listening to "Lollipop," not just for any implications but because the song is dangerously played out. So consider instead the very slept-on remix, which keeps the beat and the Auto-Tunage, but runs three strong verses of actual rapping through it all. Kanye makes a big show about how he's not going to let Wayne destroy him on this track. ’Ye sounds great, playing the scrappy underdog position where he's most comfortable, but none of that stops Wayne from still basically destroying him with the verses that follow.

2. Lil Wayne "Go DJ"
Year: 2004
Produced By: Mannie Fresh
Album: Tha Carter
Label: Cash Money/Universal

Despite what the revisionists might tell you, the main distinction between early Wayne and later Wayne was less about lyrics than it was delivery and construction. In his Hot Boy days, Wayne's flow was playfully loose and sometimes sloppy. "Go DJ" is a testament to his refinement: tightly constructed, with deep internal rhymes and every syllable in its perfect place: "I fly by you in a foreign whip on the throttle/With a model bony !!/Pair of phony !!." Meanwhile Mannie plays the perfect hypeman, shouting out grown ups, in between, chirren, and babies. (The "Go DJ" hook is lifted from old guard Cash Money members UNLV's local hit of the same name. Their subsequent disses never garnered a formal response, but Wayne quietly added insult to injury by boosting their original "Go DJ" beat for Dedication 2's "Walk It Off." Leaving behind just residue and bone, indeed.)

1. Lil Wayne "A Milli"
Year: 2008
Produced By: Bangladesh
Album: Tha Carter III
Label: Cash Money/Universal

Given the climate of anticipation surrounding it, the success of Tha Carter III was inevitable. Any lead single would've hit radio with a bang. But rather than play it safe with the pop cash, Wayne used "A Milli" to both lock down his core fanbase and convert quite a few outsiders. To Bangladesh's plate-shifting bass tones he rapped like a demon possessed, a goblin in a sea of mere goons. It's a truly singular pop record and it might just be radio's last rap-centric hit. Which is to say that the actual act of rapping, not a catchy hook or a melodic beat, was its primary draw. (After all, the hook barely exists—it's just a fragment of a couple Phife syllables snatched from an obscure A Tribe Called Quest remix.) "A Milli" was Wayne's coronation, the moment where the hip-hop nation (vocal minority of hating[..] curmudgeons aside) had no choice, but unite in collective awe of the kid from Hollygrove.