Meet Plaqueboymax, Rap’s Gen Z Tastemaker

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laqueboymax might be one of the most sought-after names in the music business right now. At 22 years old, the popular Twitch streamer is tapped into the next generation of listeners, who engage with new music via nonstop feeds of clips and snippets. He’s among the Top 15 streamers on Twitch and has recently commanded more than 5 million total watch hours each month on the platform. With franchises like “In the Booth,” where he invites guests to record a song live on stream, he’s created a new type of ecosystem for hip-hop fans online — something like MTV for the TikTok generation.

“We run the internet,” Max says of streamers like himself. He’s seated across from me on a spacious couch in the living room of his home near Hollywood Hills. “Imagine you was watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which obviously was such a big show, but it’s live with a Twitch chat, where you can interact,” he says. “That’s where streaming is heading.” The fact that he refers to the Kardashians’ hit reality-TV show — later reborn as The Kardashians — in the past tense says it all.

And it’s not just Max. The past year has seen livestreamers rise to unprecedented heights in popular culture. Adin Ross, whom Max credits as one of his early inspirations in streaming, is widely seen as being among the media figures who helped elect the current president. Kai Cenat is a household name, arguing about LeBron James on ESPN. It appears the future of entertainment has been taking place underneath the mainstream’s nose. 

In conversation, Max, born Maxwell Elliot Dent, has the youthful confidence of a varsity athlete and the charm of a talk-show host. He says he can tell when a song getting made during one of his streaming sessions is going to catch on, like his collaboration with DDG, “Pink Dreads,” which cracked the Top 50 of Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart earlier this year. “I’m going to be honest: Everything I make I feel like is going to go crazy,” he says. “It’s just the energy. When I’m into it, I’m passionate about it.”

The artists invited to Max’s stream are a well-curated blend of the internet-driven sounds of Gen Z (think Nettspend and OsamaSon) with more mainstream acts and rising stars like Cash Cobain.  A week after we talk, he’ll welcome Will Smith on the stream. “I just bring on whoever I fuck with, really,” Max says. “I might have Lazer Dim, then I might have Babytron and Central Cee. Then Xaviersobased. Then, who knows? Maybe Doechii down the line.”   

What’s up, Chat?

Max grew up in suburban West Orange, New Jersey (which he refers to as “the J”), and has played basketball for years. Growing up, his parents and siblings — an older sister and a younger brother — had a running joke that Max would get famous and move them all into a higher tax bracket. “We used to always joke around and be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to take us out the burbs,’” he says. “The family group chat was literally named ‘Max Out the Burbs.’” 

When we meet, he’s just getting back from London, where he’d been streaming every day for the past week. Those broadcasts culminated with an appearance from U.K. rap legend Skepta, who graced Max’s stream with an “In the Booth” session. Attempting to translate the scale of such an appearance to American fans, commenters on TikTok compared it to Jay-Z showing up. “When Skepta came on, he’s like, ‘Oh, what’s this? Why is it moving so fast?’” Max says.

The thousands of comments coming in live, fluttering across the screen in multicolored text at an intoxicating cadence, are also known simply as “Chat.” We are all Chat, even those of us who are not commenting. To Max, this is a sign of things to come. “I think it’s going to be super normal to go on Twitch streams — not even as a guest. You’re just living your life with whoever wants to watch,” he says. “I don’t think people can even fathom what it’s going to look like in five years. It’s crazy.” 

Even so, the house we’re in isn’t where Max actually streams. That’s a few blocks away at the FaZe Clan house, the hub of the longtime esports and content-creator crew that Max officially joined last year. This house is just where he lives with fellow streamer Silky, as a means of separating his life on stream from his IRL existence. 

He points to a few instances of over-the-line interactions with members of his community, including one overzealous fan who DM’d a girl he was seeing to congratulate her. “I think I was with her for Valentine’s Day or something, and he literally DM’d her and said, ‘I’m so happy you’re with Max,’” he recalls. “Or even some that don’t got to do with girls. I lose a game of basketball; it’s like they feel like they lost. They mad as shit.” I make the comparison to pop-star fandom. “That’s one way to look at it,” Max says. “I’m telling you, this shit is crazy. I love it, though.”

Step into the booth

Universal Studios and Capitol Records loom in the background of the FaZe mansion, which has a view overlooking Studio City. Today, the place is mostly empty except for Max and his assistant Yahya, who is busy getting all of the cameras ready to stream. Max has been going live every day of 2025 so far, and this being the 69th day of the year, he’s decided to invite one of hip-hop’s foremost sexperts, Kevin Gates, to join him.

Watching Max stream is surreal. In practice, he’s basically talking to himself, but the room is somehow transformed by the invisible presence of the chat. It quickly dawns on me how, even if I were invited, entering the frame would’ve felt like jumping onstage at Madison Square Garden.

First, we’ve got to thank the chat. Max asks them what they were up to today, and gets answers like “Roblox,” “studying for hours,” and, of course, “gooning.”

Gates and a few people from his camp arrive around 7 p.m., shuffling back toward the kitchen while keeping their voices down so as not to interrupt the stream. In a few minutes, Gates, wearing a suit and bow tie, will be showing Max the meditation practice known as box breathing — four-second inhale, four-second exhale — in front of more than 50,000 people. Later, one of Max’s friends, Tay, who is going through lady troubles, will get some free advice from Gates via FaceTime. (The key is to like yourself.) During the “In the Booth” segment, Gates pulls out a BlackBerry to write his verse, and Max has the stunned look of an archaeologist discovering an ancient relic. It would have all made for great TV.

The stream is one of Max’s best-performing, topping out at more than 70,000 viewers. Gates stays laser-focused on the comments in the chat. At one point, Max gets up to go to the restroom, and all those viewers just sit and watch as Gates writes out a quick eight bars on a piece of technology that predates many of them. It’s his first time doing anything like this, and he seems most struck by the raw immediacy of those thousands of people, locked in and engaged. After the stream wraps, he marvels at what it must take to be a successful streamer. “You gotta be built different,” Gates says.