'Lose Yourself' Lyrics & Meaning: Eminem's '8 Mile' Classic Song Goes Viral

“Lose Yourself” is having a moment once again!

The Eminem song is holding strong in the Top 10 of the Top Songs chart on Genius, and has been for weeks.

Keep reading to find out more…

The song is featured as the theme song from Eminem’s 2002 classic movie, 8 Mile.

Eminem himself provided some insight into the making of the song recently.

“When we were making 8 Mile, I was revisiting this old CD from two years before, going through old loops. I found the ‘Lose Yourself’ demo on this session where me and Jeff Bass were just making beats. Jeff was just sitting on those guitar chords, and then it went into something different. I was just like ‘Yo, that section, right there, I gotta make a beat out of that.’ I recorded the demo version of it the same day I made the beat. I didn’t like the rhyme, and put it off to the side,” he said in an official Genius annotation.

“But it’s one of those beats I never gave up on. That beat was definitely a highlight of my producing. I ended up doing the new version on the set of the movie, just writing between takes. 8 Mile wasn’t coming out for another year and a half, and Curtis [Hanson] really wanted music for the movie. He wanted it to be created from the environment, so he was pushing me to make stuff. I think ‘Lose Yourself’ was the only thing I worked on specifically for the movie,” he explained further.

“We filmed half of it in the dead of winter. We had a music trailer on set, designed like a studio. One trailer was music, and we had another with gym equipment in it. We were on lunch break, and I needed to finish the track. I don’t think it was one take all the way down, but it was one take each verse. ‘Got the first verse, okay, punch me in at the second. OK, the whole third verse.’ For some reason, I just captured something there that I didn’t want to change. I remember trying to change it and go back and re-do the vocals, and I was like ‘Yo, let me listen to the old ones? Just keep the old ones, f–k it,’” he added.

“His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy / There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti,” Eminem raps off the top.

“The first verse is all about Jimmy Smith Jr. It’s me talking about Jimmy Smith Jr.—like, I’m not saying my sweater, I’m saying his. I’m trying to show you what his life is about,” Eminem explained.

Later in Verse 2, Eminem raps: “God only knows he’s grown farther from home, he’s no father / He goes home and barely knows his own daughter.”

“Maybe people are just thinking father rhymes with daughter or something. But it’s about repeating a pattern. The trick is to get the pattern to hit on the same beat—’grown farther,’ ‘own daughter,’ the ‘knows’ and ‘goes,’ like that,” Em says.

In the third verse, he raps: “‘Cause, man, these goddamn food stamps don’t buy diapers / And there’s no movie, there’s no Mekhi Phifer, this is my life.”

“Putting the name of the actor right there in the lead single was just about the rhymes. I had started with this syllable scheme — ‘somebody’s paying the pied piper’ and ‘Mekhi Phifer‘ ended up fitting. That was all it was,” Eminem explained.

“That was one of those songs where I remember telling Paul [Rosenberg], ‘I don’t know how to write about someone else’s life.’ Because the movie is not me, the movie is Jimmy Smith Jr. So I’m playing this character, but I have to make parallels between my life and his, in this song. I gotta figure out how to reach a medium. It would sound so corny if I was just rapping as Jimmy Smith Jr. How is that going to come from a real place?” he went on.

“If I’m telling you that my daughter doesn’t have diapers, I need this amount of money to pay my bills this month, and it’s some real s–t I’m telling you, then you know that it’s just coming from me. That was the trick I had to figure out — how to make the rhyme sound like him, and then morph into me somehow, so you see the parallels between his struggles and mine.”

Listen to “Lose Yourself”…

Read the lyrics to “Lose Yourself”…

Radiohead‘s “Creep” is also one of the songs with the most searched lyrics online right now! Read the meaning behind the song.