He's one of the earliest, and biggest crossover superstars in Hip Hop.
He earned stripes in battles on wax.

He, alongside the Beastie Boys, put motherfucking Def Jam on the map, and alongside Run DMC, pushed hip hop into a new stratosphere.

And not with Rappers Delight-levels of novelty (that's a whole other discussion). Radio is a classic.

I Need Love created a new genre, laying a blueprint for countless artists to follow, with varying degrees of success and quality. But the formula was significant, particularly for it's time, and particularly coming from him at the time.

He reinvented himself in the mid-nineties with a string of hits where he perfected that formula.

He popped back up AGAIN in the early 00's on some Neptunes shit. Yeah, the same dude who did Radio and Rock The Bells was killing it on Neptunes tracks nearly two decades later.

His battle with Canibus is legendary, and a notable moment in hip hop.

I got so much more to write here, but it's fucking baffling to say that he's shy of Mt Rushmore. This man has done ALOT.

Each his own, this is largely subjective, and I got serious love for LL, so I'm impassioned here. You're not a moron or someone who doesn't know hip hop or anything like that, so I'm not trying to diss or shit on your opinion here.

I just think LL has gotten a little lost in the collective memory of hip hop. The man was a fucking monster of an artist, spanning two decades. Everything wasn't a homerun, but the things that hit were high level. And there were a lot of them.

Edit: PUT SOME MOTHERFUCKIN RESPECT ON THIS MAN'S NAME!

That is all.