To Live and Die by a Kai Cenat Stream

I’m fascinated by the ascent of livestreaming as a concept, and especially of the figures the culture has vaulted into a strange new form of celebrity, like Kai Cenat. Cenat is a New York-based personality with a massive following on the streaming platform Twitch, where an average of 35 million active daily users congregate to watch influencers play games, make music, do interviews, pull pranks, react to pop culture events—or just to live vicariously through the other side of a screen. Around 41 percent of Twitch’s total audience is teens and young adults ranging from ages 16-24, and Kai does a little bit of everything to keep their attention: He streams games, reviews new rap music drops, does themed events out in the real world, and goofs around with celebrity guests and other streamers, most of whom are Black or other people of color.

Stats don’t really do justice to how jaw-droppingly popular he is, but his IRL presence sure does. He’s become a brand magnet, signing deals with T-Mobile, and has hosted Streamer University, a four-day bootcamp that made stars of several up-and-coming content creators. Rappers from Drake to Lil Baby to Wale have reacted poorly to being criticized or otherwise written off by him. His sleep streams, which are exactly what they sound like, are appointment viewing for many. “Desireable” doesn’t begin to describe how valuable his platform has become to the entertainment ecosystem—it both supersedes and is a culmination of the detritus of scripted and reality TV, blown out into hours, even days, worth of content at a time. 

Cenat’s growing popularity and the near-ceaseless churn of the format make several problematic moments even more glaring. He’s platformed controversial figures in the past, including Chris Brown and Kodak Black, who have pled guilty to domestic and sexual abuse, respectively. He misgendered fellow streamer Kris Tyson, who identifies as a woman, in 2024, and hosted a week-long event called 7 Days In, where he, friends, and a handful of guests created a fake prison environment. But I’ve always been struck by a moment from April 2024, when he said on-stream that, compared to other members of the African diaspora, African-Americans lack a distinct culture of their own (For context, Cenat is a first-generation American whose mother is Trinidadian and father is Haitian.) This is a narrow-minded and ignorant perspective, one that’s made all the more ridiculous by the fact that Cenat has built his empire reacting to, and participating in, African-American culture in many forms.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his Mafiathon stream series. It’s a month-long drive to get his monthly subscribers up to a certain number, with streaming at all hours of the day and night. The third Mafiathon, which happened this past September, ended with him becoming the first streamer in Twitch history to reach one million paying subscribers. A big part of Mafiathon 3’s appeal came from celebrity cameos across racial lines, but many of the highlights came from Black celebrities old and young. The binary was stark, immediately separating the aspects of streaming culture that are  cutting-edge from the others attempting to integrate aspects of the Old Media into the New Space, and made plain the ways older and newer figures approach communicating with an audience in the streaming era.  

The newest addition this year was a freestyle series sponsored by On The Radar Radio, a new-age iteration of the online “radio” freestyle format that still makes or breaks rappers. In the Mafiathon edition, Kai and OTR host Gabe P sit on either side of a red and white studio while a rapper rips their hottest joints in the middle. Rappers will occasionally use their appearances on the average Cenat stream to, y’know, rap, but these freestyles are the first where the music is the main attraction on the channel. It’s hard for this kind of platforming not feel like a blatant retort to his old ignorant comments on Black American culture. Either way, artists showed up to give their all. 

The stakes were palpable every time someone took the hot seat, and while most delivered, some plateaued early, or just entirely face-planted. California’s Ab-Soul tripped the hardest—his four-minute video was so cringe-inducing, full of forgotten lyrics and mumbled, stilted bars, that he had to talk himself through choking on an Instagram Live the next day. But where he failed, several others who thrive in these conditions went in. Flint firecracker BFB Da Packman, who’s got more than a few viral freestyles under his belt, showed and proved with deadpan bars, only stumbling over a distasteful line about Diddy. Current Houston it-girl Monaleo caught a vicious flow over an otherwise chintzy gospel beat, while Detroit’s Veeze and California’s AZ Chike came through with some S-tier shit talk.

But it was two fresher faces who delivered standout starmaking turns. Atlanta’s Marcoplus wasted no time revving himself up across two different verses, getting off couplets about not even bothering to go for the wallets of rappers he outmaneuvers and crowning himself the modern-day 8Ball & MJG, all while barely breaking his dead-eyed stare into the camera. But New Jersey’s Chris Patrick was the one who ran away with the entire series. Things started off exciting enough on his first verse, but once the beat from Kendrick Lamar’s “Man At The Garden” kicked in Patrick opened his chest and bared his soul. In an intricate and carefully laid out verse, Patrick walked listeners through the loss of his grandmother, who was dealing with Alzheimer’s, and his rebound from taking on a day job after song streams weren’t paying his bills anymore. “Back when protein powder mixed with water was my only meal / Back when labels used to call us in, never close the deal,” he says, his voice growing louder and hoarser with every word. It’s spellbinding, the kind of moment I’ve been waiting for him to get since first hearing From The Heart Vol. 2 back in 2020. Putting the music first with these freestyles was a refreshing choice for Mafiathon, letting present and future stars shine doing what they do best. It was such an event, Brooklyn rapper Fivio Foreign went viral for making a song about not being included in it.

Though there was an inescapable element of pandering, many of the celebrities who came through made good use of the format's looseness. Some looked like they fit into the environment just fine, while others were naked attempting to extend their brand’s shelf life for another generation. Comedian and longtime Kai collaborator Druski is at the right party, going back and forth with Cenat about the fit of his suit and generally matching his rambunctious energy. Rappers Latto and Ice Spice, squashing their beef, galavanted around the massive property and took time to twerk to their new single “Gyatt” on camera. A few of the cross-generational guests made sense: Kevin Hart, a frequent guest already, gels well with Kai, who’s a clear student of his form. It makes sense that the 49-year-old Jim Jones, notorious for being a Peter Pan-type figure within New York hip-hop, would be in the freestyles and on the stream on some “How do you do, fellow kids?” type of time, but it’s interesting that John Legend, Mariah Carey, and Alicia Keys, already world-famous celebrities, made appearances. To them, it’s no different from Good Morning America or a GQ content video, except they can cut even looser, playing piano and giving out life advice while Kai and his friends joke around with them. The line between adapting to the times and going through the motions for views is thin, and it’s all a testament to how attention spans have shifted over the last decade.

I’m leaving this deep dive into the world of Kai Cenat with two takeaways: He’s an energetic guy whose pursuit of all things fun and exciting can lead him to be a bit careless and obnoxious. I don’t have a ton of interest in watching people like him or IShowSpeed documenting every single moment of their lives—it’s Truman Show levels of invasive and further dissolves the barrier between real life and performance in ways I’m not fully ready to embrace. Still, I can’t help but watch these freestyles and these celebrities hob-knob with him and wonder what the viewers are taking away from it. Is the average 17-year-old gonna feel compelled to give Chris Patrick a listen? Will they beg their parents for tickets to John Legend’s Get Lifted 20th anniversary tour or for an Alicia Keys piano book? It’s hard to say, but for better and for worse, one thing is true: they’re always watching.