Eminem

Bass, who wrote the guitar riff for Eminem’s Lose Yourself, testifies in the High Court in Wellington about the development of the song with co-writer Luis Resto, who replaced some of the guitar elements with keyboards in order to remove some of the rock feel of the song without losing the hip hop tone.

I picked up a guitar and started playing that opening guitar chord. At that time, I didn’t know if it was a song or not. It took [Eminem] a number of months to author the perfect lyrics that were just right for the beat…It really developed in a little studio we had set up in his trailer [when he was filming 8 Mile].

He denies the chords sound like Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir and says that while he’d heard the chords played before, he’d never heard them in that particular rhythm– by putting an accent on the third beat he says it was as if he was playing guitar and drums at the same time.

The intention was to create a tense, hypnotic feeling. It starts playing, and never goes away. Along with that drum beat, it actually will hypnotize you, where you are feeling that something’s going to happen.

When asked about the National Party’s song:

It’s a blatant rip-off…[It sounds like] Lose Yourself Lite…It doesn’t taste so good, though.