![]() But its rock and orchestral instrumentation and motivational verses transcended the movie itself, connecting Eminem to a new demographic of listeners and catapulting the soundtrack’s single to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for 12 consecutive weeks on its way to acquiring an Oscar and two Grammys. As the closing-credit song to Eminem’s unlikely box office smash, “Lose Yourself” captured the plight of the movie’s battle-rapping protagonist, a pseudo-fictional stand-in for Eminem, the white Motor City MC whose impoverished upbringing and meteoric rise to fame quickly took on a mythic quality. When 8 Mile premiered on November 6, 2002, audiences left theaters with a similar high. “It’s a matter of finding your authentic self and authentic voice.” “You have to just go for it and be exactly who you are in front of the world,” Nolan says, bridging her mindset to Eminem’s own origin story. By then a workout staple, “Lose Yourself” had become synonymous with those visceral cross-country meets, prompting her to look deeper into the song’s omnipresent, earworm status and its subliminal if not slightly generic commandments. Nolan would revisit these memories 15 years later, in a 2017 essay for Runner’s World, after her editorial team began brainstorming a list of the best running songs. “I think thought that this was relatable to all of us in one way or another.” “In a weird way, my coach was thinking ahead of his time, because it did work,” she says. You better never let it go.” Throughout months of verbally abusive practices and grueling training sessions, however, Nolan learned to isolate and adopt its time-sensitive message, leaning into the lyrics’ nervous energy and finding a flow state that would eventually help power her team to a state championship. On the way to meets, her coach ritualistically-and sometimes sadistically-pumped the song on a loop, instilling its chorus into his runners’ subconscious. ![]() “I don’t think that I immediately felt motivated, but it was a song that I immediately knew had importance.” Soon, listening to it became her team’s race-day tradition. “There’s something so hypnotic about that,” Nolan says. But when her coach began playing Eminem’s new hit, she couldn’t help but nod her head. In 2002, as a 16-year-old at the Élan School in Maine, Nolan had just begun running, hadn’t seen 8 Mile, and had never been exposed to hip-hop. The song he was sketching would never be just about him.Īli Nolan first heard “Lose Yourself” inside her cross-country team van, the opening guitar chords blasting through the speakers and rattling through her brain. But the recycled memories of his underdog, outsider upbringing-and the grit he’d needed to escape that environment-embodied a specific ladder-climbing American dream. All he needed for inspiration was a walk through his old Detroit neighborhood, where the mobile homes, the abandoned buildings, the remnants of a once-thriving industrial center all painted a bleak portrait of disenfranchised life. Inside his trailer, between shooting scenes for 8 Mile, he scribbled words in notebooks, attempting to channel the personal desperation of a character whose life he’s once lived. Eminem wasn’t exactly trying to make a global anthem.
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