A few Guinnesses into an interview in his local Irish boozer, and 26-year-old Harrow rapper Kibo is cooking. We’re talking football. As a kid, he preferred playing Fifa Street – where ordinary players backflip off walls to score incomprehensible bicycle kicks – to regular realistic Fifa. “If I’m gonna play a video game, I want to do some shit I can’t do in real life,” he says. He’s drawn to similarly miraculous footballers: Balotelli, Drogba in his Chelsea days, Ronaldinho and his dad’s favourite, Eric Cantona: “Oh God, with his collar popped, looking like Kanye West?” Kibo then recites Cantona’s 2019 Uefa president’s award speech – a mash-up of King Lear and philosophical musings on war and science – to near perfection.
Magic is at the heart of Kwelengletarianism, “the idea of being in a place that’s very grey, and trying to find a prismatic iridescence in it”, that underpins Kibo’s sensational album Kwengletaria: Ragamyff. (Cantona? “He’s a Kwengletarian to the nth degree.”) During his long rise through London’s 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. “It’s awesome,” he says of its lack of rap tradition, “a complete blank slate” 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. “But did you get any sparks?” he asks enthusiastically. “You get sparks after Stonebridge Park!”
We meet midweek, and Kibo tells me he’s heading to a wrestling match in Dublin at the weekend. I ask him who he’s watching. “No, I’m wrestling,” he fires back: he’s up against Irish rapper Lil Skag, “to see who really is ready to hold the responsibility of being the champion of Ireland”. 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: “I’ll take your mum Butlin’s / And I ain’t fucking bluffing / You’re not a bad boy, you’re an Egg McMuffin.” You’d back him to win a match on aura alone.
Add in references to anime, Pokémon, 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’s scale. “I’m quite a maximalist guy, and a lot of the artists that I gravitate towards – Ghostface Killah, MF Doom, Yung Lean – it’s all about asking, how much can you stuff into one thing?” he says.
The all-you-can-eat impulse comes from growing up online – “I was a kid with a million tabs open, trying to speak with a level of eloquence” – and the Kwelengletarianism concept stems from when Kibo’s schoolmates began trading pirated Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. “They would slap even more glitter and shine on it, to make it look like it was the most valuable shit ever,” he says. “Like, I know this is fake, but this shit looks awesome. It’s the first thing I remember in my life where I was looking at something and knowing it was valuable.”
Kibo nods to his grime forebears on the album, sampling from Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in da Corner on closer Our War Game. “My absorption of grime was very retroactive,” he says. “Going back into Dizzee, Flirta D, Skepta, and D Double E … even though it was very local, it felt like discovering Three 6 Mafia, or old Memphis rap: like, this is awesome, but it’s not here.” Where those older acts felt remote to Kibo, Novelist, the Lewisham MC behind grime’s modern resurgence and Kwengletaria’s only guest, was “the first time I was able to tune into grime sets live and feel like I was present for this thing,” Kibo says. “It’s always felt like he was bringing grime back and pushing it forward.”
What’s impressive is how clear, satisfying and relentlessly funny Kibo’s 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. “It was like someone showed me a brain scan,” he says. These collisions – of genres, references and words – create a new meta-language of smashed together non sequiturs in his work, such as “Courvoir-Sierra Leone”, or “Dimitar Burberrytov”. They’re also stamina-boosting power-ups. On Chancer, the album’s midpoint mellow grime flexer, Kibo’s criss-cross patterns unfold over three beat switches and five relentless verses.
On Bakerloo Dragon, Kibo says he gets the “charm from ma, and the swag from dad”. 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. “There was one phone box in her whole village, so it would be like, ‘You must be here at 7 o’clock.’ My dad used to work at the BT phone line so he was able to wrangle a few things.”
It made Kibo a true believer in romance. “It’s Kwengletarianism!” he says. “You’ve got to believe in something, you’ve got to believe there’s light at the end of the tunnel.” Kibo is a third generation member of Harrow’s Irish community, and there’s a distinctly Irish feeling to a project about belief, myths, good craic and finding the magic in ordinary objects.
Kwengletaria: Ragamyff is about celebrating where you’re from, but it’s 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. “I feel like I finally got a grip of London. [The track] Red Starz is like, I’ve completed London, right? It’s almost like the post-credit scene is Ryanair: oh shit, there’s 200 other countries? Damn. There’s 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.”
• Kibo plays Bristol (28 October), London (30 Oct) and Manchester (1 November)
