4 Rap Songs With Deleted Verses That Change Everything

4 ‘Lose Yourself’ Actually Revealed What ‘Losing Yourself’ Means

Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” is a strange song, for reasons you might not immediately notice. The first verse (by far the most famous part), covering the first scene of the movie 8 Mile, is written in third-person. That’s because it’s talking about the main character of 8 Mile rather than about Eminem himself — though, this character is played by Eminem. The character, Jimmy, isn’t a great rapper yet, you see, so he can’t be the one doing this song. It has to be Eminem doing it about him. 

The second verse is also mostly in third-person, and it doesn’t cover the events of the movie. It talks about a rapper who rises in fame and then falls. You might assume this is now Eminem talking about himself, not about the movie character, but he’s still talking in third-person, and the real Eminem hadn’t experienced any fall like the one described here. Perhaps then it’s the movie’s bittersweet epilogue. We next get a third verse, now in first-person, where he explicitly says he’s not covering the movie anymore but his own life. But after talking about being a struggling father (not Eminem’s current situation but still something from the past), he returns to the more distant past in the final lines to talk about being young and still living in his mom’s trailer.

When we describe it like that, it sounds needlessly complicated, doesn’t it? Instead of all that, he could have just done the whole song from his character’s point-of-view. It could have been three verses about aspiring rapper Jimmy, who has a sister and works at a plant. Here’s him doing just that, in another song on the 8 Mile soundtrack:

He did that in another song from that soundtrack, too. And originally, he planned to also stay in-character as Jimmy for “Lose Yourself.” 

Below is the song’s demo version. Same guitar intro, same beat and a similar chorus, but the verses are completely different. It’s about someone struggling to come up with a song, and the most interesting part about it is that it spends its entire length explaining what exactly the command “Lose Yourself” means.

Yeah — it may never have occurred to you before, because the idea of losing yourself in music is pretty intuitive, but the verses in the released song aren’t about the glory of losing yourself in the moment at all. They’re about someone preparing to rap, which takes great concentration and memorization rather than losing oneself. Then it’s about choking, which perhaps you could call losing yourself but isn’t something to strive for. Then it’s about his rise and fall as an artist, and if that’s losing yourself in the music, that’s again not something you want. 

But the demo is about how he, the writer, is trying to pen the perfect rap to make you forget everything and lose yourself in the music. The person seeking success laboriously crafting the song and the person who loses themselves in the music are two different people. 

There’s plenty worth keeping in the demo, but it had no third verse, so it seems it was always just a work-in-progress. Also, the chorus ends in this painful couplet:

You better move yourself ’cause tomorrow’s ass can wait
There is no time to sit there and procrastinate

That part was apparently so unsalvageable that Eminem threw out everything and rewrote the whole song from scratch. 

3 Kanye Gets Fired

Not all songs have three verses. “Stronger” by Kanye West has just two. But it originally did indeed have three, and when you listen to the missing verse, you’ll say, “Of course! That second verse was actually a third verse.” The final song’s second verse feels like it’s coming down from some plateau, which was never properly set up. Insert the verse below between the two verses, and it all fits much better.

This verse, like the rest of the song, is about someone going out to the club. But it also features these revealing lines:

Everybody go through something
People be talking to you like you nothing
You be talking to them like, “Bitch, I'm me”
Then your boss say, “Okay, then leave.”

The guy mouthed off to the wrong person — his boss. Then he got fired.

Now, you might be thinking, “That’s not what those lyrics say at all.” Clearly, those lyrics are about the boss being so intimidated by the guy’s identity that they cower and let him take the rest of the day off. But think again. If this employee were so in-command, would he even need his boss’ permission to head out? 

Also, consider the next line: “You covered up your tats too long with those sleeves.” This is someone who is routinely subjugated at work. His boss is the one in control here, so this boss would not be persuaded by the boast, “Bitch, I’m me.” No, when the boss tells him to leave, it's to leave for good. 

This is a tale of an arrogant braggart’s downfall. Let’s hope that foreshadows nothing in Kanye’s future whatsoever. 

2 The Demons in ‘Thriller’ Like You Thicc

Just the other day, we were talking about how Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” began as an entirely different song, which wasn’t Halloween-themed. It must have seemed absurd to tack on rhymes from a 72-year-old white guy, and for the music video to call those rhymes a “rap.” But that white guy was horror icon Vincent Price, and even the version of the song that you do know started out a bit different, with an additional Price verse. Here are his unabridged his lines, with only the quietest of backing music:

Here, too, the middle verse reveals what was missing in the pacing of the known song. The second half of the Price part in the finished song now feels like it’s coming down from something that was not built up, until you include this middle. Also, the middle verse features these lines:

The demons squeal in sheer delight
It's you they spy, so plump, so right

As you can see, your thickness attracts the demons, sexually. Yes, that is what it means — we shall entertain no other interpretations.

We suppose they cut this bit for length, as the Price part would otherwise span nearly as long as Michael Jackson’s share of the song. They might have still found room for it in the music video, which is 12 minutes long.

But though it’s 12 minutes long (more, counting the credits), the video not only cuts that Price verse but also cuts every chorus of the song but one. The verses are all strung together in a single uninterrupted segment, lasting a minute and a half. Then comes Price’s rap, which also lasts a minute and a half — if we count a notable stretch of silence in the middle. Hey, we think we know exactly what’s supposed to go in that gap.  

1 The ‘Fresh Prince’ Scene of Dodging Profiling

The famous theme song to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air played one way during most of the show’s run but sometimes played another way, with an additional verse. The song also had yet another verse in addition to that one, which never played during the series at all, and which hardly anyone has heard. Each of these missing verses answers a burning question that the song otherwise prompts.

Let’s start with the less obscure missing verse. The most commonly heard version of the theme song, which we can call the abridged version, jumps from one line, “You’re moving with your auntie and your uncle in Bel-Air,” right to this next one, “I whistled for a cab.” Will directs the cabbie to Bel-Air, forcing the audience to assume that he took this taxi all the way across the country, from Pennsylvania to California.

That doesn’t make sense. But the longer version of the theme song, which we can call the complete version, fills that shameful plot hole. It describes how he flew from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, traveling first class because the Banks paid for this ticket. The cab merely took him from LAX to Bel-Air, not all the way from Philly. Of course, the Hollywood sign in the background when he boards the cab should have clued us in on that. The sign is not really visible from the airport, but it always did mark this scene as taking in place in L.A. 

That verse is essential to know if, simply for the sake of argument, you read an article designed to be sung to the tune of the theme song and wonder why the rhythm suddenly gets weird in the middle. But even the complete version of the theme song leaves a question unanswered: Why is Will taking a cab at all?

This kid (a child, really) has just flown across the continent, ready to move in with his new family, coming to a house about which he knows nothing. And the family has left him to navigate to that mansion from the airport on his own? Keep in mind, this is the era before maps on phones, an era when landing in a new city left many people feeling quite lost. He has to jump in a taxi and say, “To Bel-Air,” and hope for the best.

The longest version of the theme song, which we can call the extended version, explains this. The Banks sent a car to pick him up. But when Will saw the chauffeur, things didn’t go so great:

The plane landed, and when I came out
There was a dude, looked like a cop, standing there with my name out
I ain’t trying to get arrested yet, I just got here
I sprang with the quickness like lightning, disappeared

He saw a uniformed man holding a placard with his name on it, and he thought this was an officer here to arrest him. So, he skulked out of the driver’s sight and found a ride of his own. 

You probably didn’t need to hear this joke at the start of every single episode, but it nicely set up the conflict between Will’s upbringing and the world he was about to be thrust into. The extended version had some other lines on that same theme, which similarly never made it into the show:

But wait, I hear they’re prissy, bourgeois and all that
Is this the type of place that they should send this cool cat?
I don't think so, I’ll see when I get there
I hope they're prepared for the Prince of Bel-Air

The cop mix-up also lets us know, in case there was any doubt, that Will had a few entries on his résumé that qualify as not quite legal. It was more than “one little fight” that convinced his mom to send him somewhere safer. Read between the lines, and you’ll always have known that to be true. 

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