When Aubrey Graham stepped out of the wheelchair and tried his hand at rapping, he had to prove to hip-hop he wasn’t just an actor messing around with music like it was a weekly pottery class. This was back when “gatekeeping” still mattered. The journey into music for New Jersey streamer PlaqueBoyMax has been much smoother. Beyond the usual factors of relatability and charisma, Max has a semblance of taste, which the streaming world woefully lacks. On his streams, which routinely rack up tens of thousands of concurrent viewers, he’s helped put on a new generation of rappers like Lazer Dim 700 and Nino Paid by featuring them in online shows like “Song Wars,” where songs are pitted against each other in a bracket, with winners determined by a panel of judges. (The Fader’s Vivian Medithi aptly described it as “American Idol for the SoundCloud set.”)
Almost like an underground DJ Khaled, PlaqueBoyMax is good at assembling records by calling up his contacts, picking beats from his Discord community, and catching a vibe. As his platform has grown, he’s shown he can find common ground with virtually any guest, from Central Cee to Will Smith, like a late-night TV host. His music aptitude really comes into focus in his series “In The Booth,” where he engineers sessions in real time for rappers, meticulously punching them in, line by line, giving us unexpected collabs like the rapturous BabyChiefDoIt/Nino Paid song “Coolin.” Sure, streaming is altogether pretty uncool, a sign of male loneliness and the death rattle for traditional media, but if we have to live with it, I’ll take “Coolin” over Adin Ross kissing Donald Trump’s ass.
So what happens when Max himself starts rapping? That’s the question his debut solo mixtape, Five Forever, tries to answer. What is gleaned across these 13 songs is that surrounding yourself with cool people can only take you so far; at some point, you’ve gotta have something original to say, too.
Released on Zack Bia’s Field Trip Recordings, which, of course it is, Five Forever finds Max trying out different trending styles like he’s a character in GTA flipping through fits: He’s Ken Carson on “Sevan,” deep-voiced Carti on “Yacht,” Summrs on “Tank Davis.” None of it is remotely inspiring; none of it sticks to your brain. “Rockstar lifestyle, rockstar lifestyle, she tryna get drunk, she tryna get piped down,” he moans on “Rockstar,” lyrics you might find typed out by a fan in the YouTube comments of a Yeat type beat.
It’s a shame, you’d think he’d learn a thing or two from hanging out with funny and inventive rappers like Lazer Dim 700, but this music hits like a slat of plywood. The subject matter is late nights at the club and the millions he’s made off sitting in front of a computer, but he sounds totally uninterested in any of it. That can be cool if you’re trying to flex how regular it is (see: Veeze or Jay-Z), but Max sounds more like he’s falling asleep.
He’s got a good ear for beats, but Max could tap into his network of producers even more. If we are to believe that streamers are supposed to be these larger-than-life entertainers, then their art should at least have some of that personality. Why isn’t PlaqueBoyMax really leaning into the hardest, strangest beats coming out of the underground? He needs to take a page from the book of iShowSpeed, whose harebrained experiments with baile funk as a streamer-turned-rapper feel like a musical parallel to his fish-out-of-water international travels. The most fun this thing gets is the rambunctious bounce of “Paid For,” but, then again, how do you mess up a bounce track? Instead of channeling the spontaneity and creative bursts of his streams, Five Forever drifts into the miserable grey waters of music that you wouldn’t turn off, but you would probably never turn on.
A few weeks ago, a 38-year-old Drake gave the commencement speech at the awards ceremony for Streamer University, Kai Cenat’s wild idea to invite 150 up-and-coming streamers and influencers to a weekend of classes at the University of Akron taught by luminaries like Duke Dennis and others. “It’s my belief that the individuals that attended this program and that are sitting watching this video are the next shift in media,” he said in a pre-recorded video, comparing their plight of being ridiculed to the reality TV stars of yore who now rule the world. If this is true, we might be in for a new overload of uncool, and a new generation of amorphous artist-streamer-entertainer “Guys,” characters in a constantly expanding online universe, whose main goal is to infiltrate your algorithm and capture your attention using every avenue possible. Now, kids everywhere are reaching for PlaqueBoyMax’s faux-Opium schlock on Spotify as they might for a Feastables at Walmart for the simple fact that they trust content creators who burn holes into their retinas more than faceless corporations. What’s ironic about that is you’d be hard-pressed to find a popular rap record more mind-numbingly anonymous this year.
