“Lose Yourself” by Eminem

"Lose Yourself" led off the soundtrack to the 2002 film 8 Mile, and it's Eminem at full sprint. He wrote the words himself and built the music with longtime collaborator Jeff Bass, one half of the Bass Brothers, and Luis Resto, who share the production credit with him. The track rides a tense, clenched groove that grows heavier with every verse, with enough muscle that rock stations happily claimed it too.

It gave Eminem his first number one on the Billboard Hot 100, where it sat for twelve straight weeks, and it topped the charts in nineteen other countries. Plenty of critics called it the best thing he had done yet. The video, which Eminem directed with his manager Paul Rosenberg and Phillip G. Atwell, mixes in scenes from and in the spirit of the film, with Eminem rapping beside the 8 Mile Rd. Mobile Court sign from the soundtrack cover, and it won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Video from a Film.

The trophies kept coming: no hip-hop song had ever taken the Academy Award for Best Original Song before it, and it took Grammys for Best Rap Song and Best Rap Solo Performance. Rolling Stone put it at 166 on its 2004 greatest-songs list, and American fans alone have bought 10 million downloads of it. Eminem sprang it as a surprise at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020 and played it at the Super Bowl LVI halftime show in 2022, with Anderson .Paak on drums.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.