Steve 'Flash' JuonFull disclosure — I’m friends with Emperor Big D and most of the knowledge I have of Dragon Ball or Dragon Ball Z comes from him. In fact I’m so overwhelmed by the volume of DB related content from Akira Toriyama that I have several times asked him for a “recommended viewing order” or “best version to buy” and have gotten nowhere. That’s not his fault. I wouldn’t want that kind of pressure to tell someone “the right way” to watch Dragon Ball content when there’s SO MUCH out there with so many different remasters, reissues and re-dubs. I tried buying season one of DBZ from a thrift and all I could get out of him was “don’t watch it that way.” Okay. I’m enough of an anime nerd that I prefer a Japanese dub with English subtitles, so I sold that shit back. I’m back at square one though.
Here’s what I can tell you from my own rudimentary knowledge — Trunks is the half-human, half-Saiyan son of Vegeta and Bulma. He’s initially introduced as an adult time traveler who came back to warn Goku about a terrible threat he would soon face. This incarnation is colloquially referred to as “Future Trunks” and presumed to be from an alternate timeline (since the warning changed his own future) and not to be confused with the “Kid Trunks” that occurs naturally later on. If I got any of this wrong I’m sure D will rip me a new one. All I can assume about a rapper calling himself Kid Trunks or his album “The Kid Before Trunks” is that he’s a huge Dragon Ball fan, and since he has another album called “Super Saiyan” I’m pretty confident in that assertion.
The problem I’m having here is that I was expecting some nerdcore rap about the anime, the manga, the video games and the movies. That’s my fault to some degree, but if you call yourself Kid Trunks, you’re also setting up a certain expectation for newcomers. He also calls himself “The Greatest Asian Rapper Alive” and I don’t think that’s accurate either. He’s not better than Lyrics Born, Dumbfoundead, Anderson .Paak or any of dozens of others I can drop hyperlinks to. “Do You Remember?” Yes I do Kid. I remember all of them. I’m not sure I will remember you.
Kid Trunks sounds like a low rent version of the late Juice WRLD, high on syrup and AutoTune, wandering his way through cloudy ambient instrumentals without at least making the emotional connection with listeners that Juice did. At least that’s what Kid Trunks sounds like when he sounds good. When he sounds bad he’s throwing out casually trashy lyrics about getting brain and how he “use a gun like a utensil” on “Mustard Gold.” He should imitate Jarad Higgins more. The song is so low effort that it’s only 72 seconds long and he can’t even make it two-thirds of the way through before running out of shit to say.
The only redeeming part of “The Kid Before Trunks” is that some of the songs like “Talk” are trunk rattlers. Guests like Flyboy Tarantino and Larry League are less interesting than our protagonist, and take up far too much valuable time on an album where Kid Trunks only has 22 minutes to convince you he’s as good as he says. Songs like “3am In Miami” don’t do it no matter how many “bitches in London” he brags that he has, and I’d just rather listen to the K Camp song of the same name. What we have here barely qualifies as an album at all, but based on his name alone he got enough recognition for it to pop off on Soundcloud, YouTube and Spotify. If there were a real Future Trunks he would have come back to warn us not to listen to his younger self’s music.