“It Looks Like a Basquiat Painting”: Denaun Explains What Eminem's Rhyme Pads Actually Are

Asked when Eminem started writing in circles, Denaun described a system built since childhood: find a word you don't know, find five that rhyme with it, connect them, repeat forever.

Everyone has seen the photos of Eminem's notepads: words stacked sideways, diagonal, in spirals, whole pages that look like static. On The 3rd Verse, around the 1:27:00 mark of the same marathon interview that gave us the album status answer and the idea vault, Denaun Porter was asked directly: when did Em start writing like that?

Denaun Porter: "That shit look like art. People think I be lying about that. That shit look like art."

Then he explained what the pages actually are, and it is not chaos. It is a filing system.

Denaun Porter: "He's been collecting data on words that rhyme since we were kids."

Set to start at 1:27:03, right as the question lands.

The method, in Eminem's own words

Denaun says Eminem once walked him through the routine himself, and it is the closest thing to a repeatable formula anyone from the camp has ever shared:

Denaun Porter: "He told me this. He was like, 'When you get a word that you don't know, you go find four or five words that rhyme with it, then find four or five more, and then find another way to connect that.' And he does that all day."

All day. Not in album mode, not on deadline. As a permanent background process. It lines up with everything else we have heard from inside the building this month, from "he write like he poor" to Jake Bass digging through session tapes going back to Infinite. The writing never had an off switch.

And the pages themselves:

Denaun Porter: "The way he writes looks like a Basquiat painting. You can't even read it. [...] You can't look at his paper and know. Who you think going to get these papers? Cuz they not going to be able to read it. Cuz he writes right here, then he writes right here."

That last part is the quiet punchline. The famous stash of legal pads is effectively encrypted. Even if the papers left the building, they would be useless to anyone but the man who wrote them.

"Do you know how much OpenAI or Anthropic would pay for his writings?"

Denaun also revealed what he told Paul Rosenberg about the stash, and it is a very 2026 way to size it up:

Denaun Porter: "You know what I told Paul? I said, do you know how much OpenAI or Anthropic or somebody would pay for his writings? [...] I told Paul he created the biggest database of words that rhymes. Bigger, more than a computer ever could. And I'm not even playing."

Set aside the hyperbole and the point stands up. A rhyme dictionary knows that two words rhyme. Thirty-plus years of Eminem's pads record something no model has: which connections a human ear actually accepts, bent across accents and compound syllables, tested on records that sold hundreds of millions. Denaun framing his best friend's notebooks as training data that the AI labs cannot buy is also a pointed joke in a camp that has been openly skeptical of AI, as Dr. Dre made very clear in August.

He closed the thought with the comparison that gives this story its shape:

Denaun Porter: "And he don't think of it like that. It's like watching A Beautiful Mind."

Why this lands differently than the folklore

The stacking-words legend is old. Eminem showed Anderson Cooper the boxes of paper on 60 Minutes back in 2010, and "he rhymes words that don't rhyme" has been a talking point for two decades. What Denaun adds is the mechanism. It is not a gift that arrives when the beat drops. It is a deliberate collection habit, running since childhood, with its own retrieval system: he has said before that Em knows exactly which book to go to for a rhyme he wrote five or six years ago.

Nobody watching in 1997 would have called filling notebooks with unreadable word clusters a business plan. Three decades later it reads as the whole explanation. The catalog, the ten-billion-stream albums, the technical ceiling nobody has matched: all of it sits on top of a database one man has been building by hand, in circles, since before anyone was paying him to do it.