An artists album title, when chosen consciously with care, typically serves to tell the listener what they’re generally in for. To that same thought, an artist’s name serves as the first true introduction to the artist and what they’re all about. While it doesn’t have to be outrightly explained, reading or hearing it automatically guides the listener to a specific direction. 

So you can imagine where our heads went when we learned of “Thoughts in my Mind” by KumTheRapper. 

And then as we navigated to the artists Spotify page to see the album cover art, which seems to be an AI generated image of a young black man with an implied halo illuminating his head, we were even more taken aback. 

But we go into every album without judgment and prefer to let the music do the speaking and so we let it begin to play.

The record starts with “These Thoughts” which, instrumentally has the potential to set you up for an absolute banger of a tune, full of poetic prose and insightful wisdom about one’s lived experience, but instead KumTheRapper wastes the entire production repeating “These thoughts in my mind, but they’re not mine,” and the occasional verse that sounds wildly immature lyrically, when odd production techniques jump into the mix showing a complete lack of expertise from whomever produces or mixed this. It’s trite and boring and underwhelming, but we cautiously soldier on believing this could be the beginning of a truly great art project. 

Over the next couple tracks we’re treated to what feels like unintentionally uncompleted tracks just over a minute in length where our rapper says nothing really at all and seems to lack any real ability in the artform. 

Of course we all have to start somewhere so what we believe we’re hearing are the absolute beginning stages of someone trying to find their own voice. But it is a little grating and unlike the way a proud parent can whimsically clap through their child’s kindergarten recital where they play a mean off-tempo tambourine, we have no connection to KumTheRapper at this point and it’s really challenging to want to finish the record. 

Halfway through we find ourselves in “Fantasies” which reminds us a little of Lil Wayne, or someone doing Lil Wayne karaoke. The production again here isn’t terrible, we’d even call it “alright” though it doesn’t do anything that really jumps out at us or make us want to bop along. 

As expected, it’s not long before KumTheRapper turns the content sexual except it completely lacks any sexual appeal and we wish he hadn’t gone there. 

By track 6, “Flowin’” it’s pretty clear that KumTheRapper is just paroding a lot of other much more successful rappers and he himself has nothing to really say.

And that’s fine for a hobbyist but it makes for really bad rap for a commercial audience so it’s a wonder how this guy has something like 2500 monthly listeners on Spotify. 

There are small moments where we believe KumTheRapper is trying to actually express himself as he talks about using his music as his personal therapy – we’re not ones to diminish anyone ever doing this but as we listen to another track prematurely fade out because he’s run out of things to not-say, we have to stress that it seems as though this young artist hasn’t spent nearly enough time defining his own sound or voice. 

As “Gotta Go” emerges from our laptop speakers, we, too are throwing in the towel. 

This project isn’t for us but we’re sure it still has some sort of value in the right audience, like people that enjoy music created by robots. Fans of early Lil Wayne or people heavily inebriated by lean might dig the casual way this record has been thrown together.