Lose Yourself in These Lyrics

"Lose Yourself" by Eminem was released on September 17th, 2002 in Marshall's movie, 8 Mile. "Lose Yourself" received acclaim from music critics, with many critics praising the song's inspiring, aggressive themes and describing it as Eminem's best work to date. Aside from being one of the only white rappers in the game, Eminem is most commonly famous for his creative lyrics and incredible flow. Eminem can take the audience on a story with ease. In Lose Yourself Eminem does this the best.

The song's lyrics explicitly sum up the background of Eminem's character in 8 Mile, B-Rabbit, with the first verse summing up much of the plot of the movie. The song incorporates several aggressive themes, largely dealing with the struggles dealt with by B-Rabbit, and how he eventually overcomes his many problems and obstacles to gain the respect of other rappers. It is similar to how Eminem needed to prove himself in the rap game due to being white in a predominantly African-American music genre.

For the more in depth analysis, most people consider rap to be rhyming the last two words of a sentence and being able to rap the line with a good tone and good flow. But, Eminem takes it a step further. He rhymes almost every single word in the sentence with the line preceding it. Also, aside from the complexity of the rhymes, he’s constantly rapping with good flow, never missing a beat.

His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There’s vomit on his sweater already: mom’s spaghetti
He’s nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready
To drop bombs but he keeps calm and ready

The rhyme scheme is as follows:
-AB,CC,AB,
-DD-B,AB,
-E,-E-AB,
-A-AB,
A being : Palms, Arms, Moms, Calm, Bomb, om
B being: Sweaty, Heavy, Already, spaghetti, Ready, forgetting
C being: knees, week
D being: vomit, on it
E being: Nervous, Surface

Eminem starts off the bat with a 4 syllable compound ( palms are sweaty ) and rhymes it for 4 more times (arms are heavy, mom’s spaghetti, calm and ready, calm and ready) meanwhile he also uses the second part of the compound on the second bar (already) and the first part on the 4th bar (bombs), to top it all off Eminem also squeezes in internal 3 types of internal rhymes (The C, B and E). And this is only in the beginning of the song, doing the whole song would be too much. The effectiveness of his rhyming paired with his storytelling creates an instant classic from on of the greatest rappers of all time.