Macklemore & Ryan Lewis may be working separately for the time being — Macklemore’s solo album, Gemini, just came out, and Lewis is busying himself with production projects (he produced/co-wrote Kesha’s comeback single, “Praying”) and his own music — but the two are still best buddies, as evidenced by their adorable rapport while record shopping at Denver’s Wax Trax store.

It’s a bond they’ve shared since meeting on Myspace in 2006, after which Lewis became the rapper’s photographer and, later, his artistic partner. “We had nothing in common at that time,” admits Macklemore (real name: Ben Haggerty) with a laugh. “Ryan was like, ‘You like Jedi Mind Tricks? Oh, you’re not really that familiar? Well, we don’t have anything to talk about, then.’”

But the two ended up in each other’s top eight friends — and they still are, in real life.

“It was all so very dramatic, like, are you the first top friend or the second top friend? There was a hierarchy!” Lewis chuckles, remembering Myspace’s post-Friendster, pre-Facebook heyday. “And you would bump around, too. You’d wake up one day, you’d think you were friends with Jonathan, and then you dropped from No. 5 to No. 7. It was like everyone had their own little Billboard charts of friends, and you didn’t know where you were going to end up.”

Lewis gets even more nostalgic thinking about the mid-aughts, when music was taking over the internet like never before. “When we first started making music, you’re talking about, like, the pinnacle peak of mixtapes really emerging and becoming a thing. The emergence of blog reviews. So a whole shift, you know? And the beginnings of a lot of different people’s careers, like Wiz Khalifa coming out with a mixtape.

“I actually think we’re almost to the time that Myspace can now make a comeback. … Nobody has replaced what the Myspace music player really was. They truly put the music player side by side with social media in a way that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, nobody else ever did. And for artists in particular, that was your real good gauge of where somebody was at in their career.”

So, are Lewis and Macklemore’s personal legacy Myspace pages still up and running? “God, I hope not,” groans Lewis.

Get even more nostalgic with the longtime friends and fellow music obsessives, as they go from digital to analog and dig through Wax Trax’s vinyl crates — reminiscing about Kanye West, Digital Underground, Queen, Master P, and more.

Kanye West, The College Dropout

Macklemore: This is a great album. I love this album. … This was an imperative album to hip-hop.

Lewis: What’s your favorite song on the album?

Macklemore: It might be “Jesus Walks.”

Lewis: It’s gotta be “Jesus Walks”!

Macklemore: Yeah, my favorite would be “Jesus Walks.” I really like “Get ’Em High.” “Family Business” was great. Although I was hip to Kanye before this came out, and he had a demo of “Family Business” that I had probably a year before. And then he rerecorded it and put it in on this.

Lewis: And you like the first one much better, right?

Macklemore: Yes, I liked the messed-up recording.

Lewis: That’s usually how it is.

Macklemore: This is a great album. It changed hip-hop. … I will say that up until this point, you have a 50 Cent, dominant gangster rap [style]. And then Kanye came out and he was this, like, liberal arts dude who was an artist, who wasn’t from the street, didn’t really rap about it, came out being vulnerable, talking about insecurities, talking about his shortcomings, putting that on a record and really opening up an emotional side of rap that hadn’t been there before. Like, it’s OK to be myself. It’s OK to talk about what I am and what I’m not, and I don’t need to have this persona in order to, for one, make successful music, and two, make good music that resonates with hip-hop.

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