{"id":618249,"date":"2026-09-08T13:54:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T13:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/618249\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T13:54:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T13:54:12","slug":"cantonas-a-kwengletarian-inside-the-maximalist-magical-mentality-of-rising-london-irish-rapper-kibo-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/618249\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Cantona\u2019s a Kwengletarian!\u2019 Inside the maximalist, magical mentality of rising London Irish rapper Kibo | Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few Guinnesses into an interview in his local Irish boozer, and 26-year-old Harrow rapper Kibo is cooking. We\u2019re talking football. As a kid, he preferred playing Fifa Street \u2013 where ordinary players backflip off walls to score incomprehensible bicycle kicks \u2013 to regular realistic Fifa. \u201cIf I\u2019m gonna play a video game, I want to do some shit I can\u2019t do in real life,\u201d he says. He\u2019s drawn to similarly miraculous footballers: Balotelli<\/a>, Drogba in his Chelsea days, Ronaldinho and his dad\u2019s favourite, Eric Cantona: \u201cOh God, with his collar popped, looking like Kanye West?\u201d Kibo then recites Cantona\u2019s 2019 Uefa president\u2019s award speech<\/a> \u2013 a mash-up of King Lear and philosophical musings on war and science \u2013 to near perfection.<\/p>\n

Magic is at the heart of Kwelengletarianism, \u201cthe idea of being in a place that\u2019s very grey, and trying to find a prismatic iridescence in it\u201d, that underpins Kibo\u2019s sensational album Kwengletaria: Ragamyff. (Cantona? \u201cHe\u2019s a Kwengletarian to the nth degree.\u201d) During his long rise through London\u2019s rap scene, canonised by co-signs from Skepta, JME and Dave, Kibo has become a rare MC from Harrow, the town that produced Kate Nash and Jai Paul but no rappers of note. \u201cIt\u2019s awesome,\u201d he says of its lack of rap tradition, \u201ca complete blank slate\u201d to be as imaginative as he wants. Kwengletaria finds the myth in the mundane: on the track Bakerloo Dragon, a normal tube journey becomes a cruising broken-beat roller aboard a fire-spitting Bakerloo line train. I tell him my train to Harrow was one of these flame-graffitied dragons. \u201cBut did you get any sparks?\u201d he asks enthusiastically. \u201cYou get sparks after Stonebridge Park!\u201d<\/p>\n

We meet midweek, and Kibo tells me he\u2019s heading to a wrestling match in Dublin at the weekend. I ask him who he\u2019s watching. \u201cNo, I\u2019m wrestling,\u201d he fires back: he\u2019s up against Irish rapper Lil Skag, \u201cto see who really is ready to hold the responsibility of being the champion of Ireland\u201d. Kibo is 6ft 4in tall, possessing Irish heritage, a goatee, a mane of hair straight from a fantasy film, and a sackful of devastatingly rude bars: \u201cI\u2019ll take your mum Butlin\u2019s \/ And I ain\u2019t fucking bluffing \/ You\u2019re not a bad boy, you\u2019re an Egg McMuffin.\u201d You\u2019d back him to win a match on aura alone.<\/p>\n

Add in references to anime, Pok\u00e9mon, chicken shops and X-wing fighters, combine it with 16 producers making beats spanning garage, R&B, donk, grime and jungle, and you get a sense of Kwengletaria: Ragamyff\u2019s scale. \u201cI\u2019m quite a maximalist guy, and a lot of the artists that I gravitate towards \u2013 Ghostface Killah, MF Doom, Yung Lean \u2013 it\u2019s all about asking, how much can you stuff into one thing?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The all-you-can-eat impulse comes from growing up online \u2013 \u201cI was a kid with a million tabs open, trying to speak with a level of eloquence\u201d \u2013 and the Kwelengletarianism concept stems from when Kibo\u2019s schoolmates began trading pirated Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. \u201cThey would slap even more glitter and shine on it, to make it look like it was the most valuable shit ever,\u201d he says. \u201cLike, I know this is fake, but this shit looks awesome. It\u2019s the first thing I remember in my life where I was looking at something and knowing it was valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kibo nods to his grime forebears on the album, sampling from Dizzee Rascal\u2019s Boy in da Corner on closer Our War Game. \u201cMy absorption of grime was very retroactive,\u201d he says. \u201cGoing back into Dizzee, Flirta D, Skepta, and D Double E \u2026 even though it was very local, it felt like discovering Three 6 Mafia, or old Memphis rap: like, this is awesome, but it\u2019s not here.\u201d Where those older acts felt remote to Kibo, Novelist, the Lewisham MC behind grime\u2019s modern resurgence and Kwengletaria\u2019s only guest, was \u201cthe first time I was able to tune into grime sets live and feel like I was present for this thing,\u201d Kibo says. \u201cIt\u2019s always felt like he was bringing grime back and pushing it forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Charm from ma, swag from dad\u2019 \u2026 Kibo. Photograph: Swurla<\/p>\n

What\u2019s impressive is how clear, satisfying and relentlessly funny Kibo\u2019s path through the melee is. He shouts out Fiona Templeton, an academic at Brunel University (where he got a first in film, drama and media) for giving him a word for what he was doing: hyperdiction. \u201cIt was like someone showed me a brain scan,\u201d he says. These collisions \u2013 of genres, references and words \u2013 create a new meta-language of smashed together non sequiturs in his work, such as \u201cCourvoir-Sierra Leone\u201d, or \u201cDimitar Burberrytov\u201d. They\u2019re also stamina-boosting power-ups. On Chancer, the album\u2019s midpoint mellow grime flexer, Kibo\u2019s criss-cross patterns unfold over three beat switches and five relentless verses.<\/p>\n

On Bakerloo Dragon, Kibo says he gets the \u201ccharm from ma, and the swag from dad\u201d. Eileen of Limerick fell swiftly in love with John, a drummer from Harrow, when he was over in Ireland for a holiday. They navigated a two-year long-distance relationship before she moved to England. \u201cThere was one phone box in her whole village, so it would be like, \u2018You must be here at 7 o\u2019clock.\u2019 My dad used to work at the BT phone line so he was able to wrangle a few things.\u201d<\/p>\n

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It made Kibo a true believer in romance. \u201cIt\u2019s Kwengletarianism!\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to believe in something, you\u2019ve got to believe there\u2019s light at the end of the tunnel.\u201d Kibo is a third generation member of Harrow\u2019s Irish community, and there\u2019s a distinctly Irish feeling to a project about belief, myths, good craic and finding the magic in ordinary objects.<\/p>\n

Kwengletaria: Ragamyff is about celebrating where you\u2019re from, but it\u2019s also about feeling stuck in a place that, once the iridescent sheen has faded, is still grey and boring. Off the back of the album, and a medley of viral live clips, Kibo has his sights set beyond Harrow. \u201cI feel like I finally got a grip of London. [The track] Red Starz is like, I\u2019ve completed London, right? It\u2019s almost like the post-credit scene is Ryanair: oh shit, there\u2019s 200 other countries? Damn. There\u2019s a crunch point there, between leaving home and returning. But if you find the magic and the pride in your base, you can always come back to that and recharge. Home is like your charging point.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kibo plays Bristol (28 October), London (30 Oct) and Manchester (1 November)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few Guinnesses into an interview in his local Irish boozer, and 26-year-old Harrow rapper Kibo is cooking.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":["post-618249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}