Denaun Porter Says Eminem Never Loses an Idea — and the Catalogue Backs Him Up

A producer's answer to a fan question turned into the clearest description anyone has given of how Eminem actually works: a filing system that spans decades and a rejection rate most artists could not survive.

Denaun Porter — Mr. Porter, D12's producer, one of the few people who has been in the room for basically all of it — was recently streaming from his studio, taking questions and talking through his working habits. Rapper Marv Won was on the stream with him.

Asked about the practices that matter most, Denaun gave one answer above the others: learn to keep track of your ideas and go back for them. And he credited the habit directly to Eminem.

The eight-year beat

The example he gave is the useful part, because it is checkable.

Denaun Porter: "I did 'Yah Yah' in 2012. That's how old that beat was. I think it was around Slaughterhouse time. Em is the kind of person — he doesn't forget ideas. I don't know how he does this, but he was remembering stuff in his book. He can go in his book and remember something he wrote from I don't know how long ago in a verse. He knows what book to go to. It's wild."

"Yah Yah" came out on Music to Be Murdered By in January 2020. It features Royce da 5'9", Black Thought, Q-Tip and Denaun himself — a posse cut built as a deliberate throwback, and one of the most respected tracks on the album among people who care about that era.

The beat, on Denaun's account, was made around 2012, during the Slaughterhouse period. That is a beat sitting in a folder for roughly eight years before it became a record with a Roots MC and a Native Tongues founder on it.

The detail about "his book" is the one worth sitting with. Eminem's notebooks are hip-hop folklore at this point — the boxes of paper, the handwriting, the shots of him in the studio with pages spread out. Denaun is describing them as something more specific than a keepsake: a functioning index. Not "he keeps old lyrics," but "he knows which book to go to."

The part that's harder to hear

The flip side of never losing an idea is being willing to cut almost all of them, and Denaun was candid that Eminem's rejection rate is brutal — including on material the room loves.

Denaun Porter: "Technically, for The Death of Slim Shady, we might have had like three or four ideas, and some of those were songs. And sometimes they don't work."

"Let me tell y'all something. Paul can attest to this. I had a banger for Kamikaze. It was a complete banger. I won't tell y'all the title of the song or nothing, 'cause like I said, Em is the kind of person that goes back and listens to something. He's a master at that. That's one person that I know be able to go back."

Read that carefully, because there are two claims stacked in it.

The first is that Denaun made a track he rated highly for Kamikaze — the 2018 album — and it did not make the cut. The second, and the reason he refuses to name it, is that he still expects it to surface. He is not describing a song that got killed. He is describing a song that is queued.

That is why he won't say the title. Naming it would burn it. Eight years after the fact, a producer is still protecting a shelved beat because the man who shelved it has a documented habit of coming back.

Why this squares with everything else we know

This is not a producer being romantic about his collaborator. It matches the way Eminem's catalogue actually behaves.

• The exception proves it. Kamikaze is the one album made fast, and Eminem flagged that himself in the release tweet: "Tried not 2 overthink this 1." He said it because it is not what he normally does. We looked at how that album has held up in Kamikaze at eight.
• Verses outlive their sessions. Multiple collaborators over the years have described Eminem holding material for one project and placing it on another, sometimes albums later.
• The archive is real and physical. The notebooks are not a myth; they show up in photos, in documentary footage, and in the auction market — his handwritten pages have been sold as collectibles.

What Denaun is describing is less "genius memory" than a system: write everything, file everything, kill most of it, and keep an index good enough that an eight-year-old idea can be retrieved on demand when the right guests are finally available. "Yah Yah" needed Black Thought and Q-Tip in the same place. That took until 2020. The beat waited.

The practical version

Denaun's point on the stream was addressed to producers, and it survives translation to anyone who makes anything: the pruning is not deletion. He admits he has had to pull his own music out of projects repeatedly, and that it never stops being painful. The habit he took from Eminem is the thing that makes it survivable — if nothing is thrown away, then nothing cut is actually lost, it is just not yet.

Somewhere there is a Kamikaze-era Denaun Porter beat that its own producer calls a complete banger, that Paul Rosenberg can vouch for, and that has been sitting in Eminem's library for eight years. On the evidence of "Yah Yah," that is not a lost song. It is an unreleased one.

Sources. Denaun Porter's quotes come from his studio livestream with Marv Won, via ePro (eminem.news), August 2026 — second-hand, not our own reporting. "Yah Yah" is on Music to Be Murdered By (January 17, 2020) with Royce da 5'9", Black Thought, Q-Tip and Denaun. Kamikaze: August 31, 2018. The Death of Slim Shady: July 12, 2024.