In February, Eminem made a surprise appearance at the 2020 Academy Awards to perform “Lose Yourself,” his 8 Mile sountrack cut which won an Oscar for Best Original Song in 2003. During an appearance on Hotboxin' with Mike Tyson, the Detroit MC revealed how the performance nearly went off the rails.
“When I went out there everything was cool. I go through the first verse and they had the mic pack that you wear to clip on your belt and then you got the in-ears that go in your ears so you can hear the sound,” he remembered. “And I’m rapping and all of a sudden I see between my legs the motherf*cking pack’s swinging. What the f*ck?!”
Em went on to describe how he unsuccessfully tried to get control of the pack during the rest of his performance. By the time he put it in his front pocket, he had already run through the song successfully.
“By that time the song is over and I’m like man, what the f*ck,” he said. “We rehearsed for that sh*t, I know the words to ‘Lose Yourself,’ but we rehearsed that sh*t extra, extra, extra just so we didn’t f*ck that up and then that was the one thing we didn’t plan for and of course it went wrong.”
Although Tyson and his co-hosts assured Em that no one noticed the gaffe, the rapper shared that he still refuses to watch the performance. “I got creeped out, I don’t want to see this sh*t, I’ll just get angry,“ he explained.
The Oscars performance caused the already-popular “Lose Yourself” to spike 441 percent on Genius. It also experienced a 1,894 percent overnight sales bump.
In an interview with Variety following the Oscars, Em explained why he finally chose to perform the song 17 years after winning an Oscar for it.
“I kinda figured maybe since I didn’t get a chance to do it at the time, maybe it would be cool,” he said. “Back then, I never even thought that I had a chance to win, and we had just performed ‘Lose Yourself’ on the Grammys with the Roots a couple of weeks before the Oscars, so we didn’t think it was a good idea. And also, back at that time, the younger me didn’t really feel like a show like that would understand me.”
Watch the full interview above, and read all the lyrics to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” on Genius now.
