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.