Billboard Top 100, 2003: #28 
Eminem is an important figure in modern music history, mainly because his work is the reason that the very idea of a white rapper isn't a joke.
But I think we're past that now. He's one of the great talents of our time - forget the color of his skin or the genre he works in.
Lose Yourself could be the first act of a play:
...a piano exudes melodrama as the curtain opens. The narrator asks the fateful question to be faced ("If you had one opportunity...would you take it?"). The piano gives way to a short guitar riff - a beating heart - really a pounding heart...
Right away, in that opening moment, our main character falls flat on his face, overcome by stage fright ("he opens his mouth, but the words won't come out").
In the next scene, he has some success, but he causes so much trouble for himself and his family that it's hardly worth it, and then it all slips through his fingers anyway.
...a piano exudes melodrama as the curtain opens. The narrator asks the fateful question to be faced ("If you had one opportunity...would you take it?"). The piano gives way to a short guitar riff - a beating heart - really a pounding heart...
Right away, in that opening moment, our main character falls flat on his face, overcome by stage fright ("he opens his mouth, but the words won't come out").
In the next scene, he has some success, but he causes so much trouble for himself and his family that it's hardly worth it, and then it all slips through his fingers anyway.
Just when it seems time to give up on him, it's that third scene where the audience finally gets inspiration to root for the hero. He runs the emotional gamut, from anger to passion, frustration to helplessness, to realization, and finally to resolve:
No more games, I'ma change what you call rage
Tear this motherf**kin' roof off, like 2 dogs caged
I was playing in the beginning, the mood all changed
I've been chewed up and spit out and booed off stage
But I kept rhyming and stepped right into the next cypher
Best believe somebody's paying the pied piper
All the pain inside amplified by the fact
That I can't get by with my 9 to 5
And I can't provide the right type of life for my family
Cause man, these goddam food stamps don't buy diapers
And it's no movie - there's no Mekhi Phifer - this is my life
And these times are so hard, and it's getting even harder
Trying to feed and water my seed, plus
Teeter-totter caught up between being a father and a prima donna
Baby mama drama's screaming on and
Too much for me to wanna
Stay in one spot, another day of monotony
Has gotten me to the point, I'm like a snail
I've got to formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot
Success is my only motherf**kin' option, failure's not
Mom, I love you, but this trailer's got to go
I cannot grow old in Salem's Lot
So here I go it's my shot - feet fail me not
Tear this motherf**kin' roof off, like 2 dogs caged
I was playing in the beginning, the mood all changed
I've been chewed up and spit out and booed off stage
But I kept rhyming and stepped right into the next cypher
Best believe somebody's paying the pied piper
All the pain inside amplified by the fact
That I can't get by with my 9 to 5
And I can't provide the right type of life for my family
Cause man, these goddam food stamps don't buy diapers
And it's no movie - there's no Mekhi Phifer - this is my life
And these times are so hard, and it's getting even harder
Trying to feed and water my seed, plus
Teeter-totter caught up between being a father and a prima donna
Baby mama drama's screaming on and
Too much for me to wanna
Stay in one spot, another day of monotony
Has gotten me to the point, I'm like a snail
I've got to formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot
Success is my only motherf**kin' option, failure's not
Mom, I love you, but this trailer's got to go
I cannot grow old in Salem's Lot
So here I go it's my shot - feet fail me not
This may be the only opportunity that I got!
Songwriters seldom expose a raw nerve like this, especially considering how much of it we all know to be autobiographical. But that's what greatness takes. "Write what you know," the old saw goes. If you have the courage to lay it all out there, it really works.
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