Mac Miller died at 26 of a reported drug overdose on Friday, and if the immediate reactions from his hip-hop peers prove anything, it’s that Miller was a rapper’s rapper beloved by anyone in the community who knew him, listened to him, or was just getting familiar with his work and story — so much so that even Jay-Z fell into the latter camp. In June last year, during a rare (and allegedly sober) tweetstorm, Jay-Z broke his social media silence to thank all the rappers who’ve inspired him as he prepared to become the first rapper ever inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He listed all the greats (Rakim, Tupac, Wu-Tang), his modern contemporaries (Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Nicki Minaj), and recounted old memories from his decades in the rap game. But he couldn’t quite work out how to properly tweet.
Further cementing his hip-hop elder status — and in true dad-on-Twitter form — Jay then ended his rap scroll in astonishment that “black people really are magic.†Except he didn’t actually stop there. Now that he had your attention, Jay-Z then took this moment of honoring black excellence to commend those white folk who try their best, naming one among the bunch: Mac Miller. “Mac Miller nice too,†wrote the legend. It’s the perfect summation of Miller’s legacy: An actually nice human, by all accounts, who also happened to be a fairly nice rapper on a technical level to boot. It was all enough to make Mac the only other white rapper Jay saw fit to shout out on that random summer night besides Eminem, and it’ll be immortalized forever, even if only on Miller’s wall: