London MC Kibo is on a mission to bring “a sense of magic” to life’s mundanity

“M ark Zuckerberg is my number one person I would like to donate some Kwengletarianism to,” Kibo declares, chuckling over Zoom.

“I saw him do one interview where he was talking about sometimes he drinks coffee recreationally, and I was just like, ‘Oh, someone needs to get this guy a packet of pickled onion Monster Munch, a four-pack of Red Stripe, and let him listen to Max B’s greatest hits, and watch The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy .’” The London MC’s self-devised mythology has come to define a lot of the chatter around him.

It’s not a religion or a cult, but a way of making sense of the world, growing out of him slowly figuring out which things gave him a sense of inspiration and fantasy.

His mates would call him Kwengletaire, and over time he began building a mythology around that feeling, eventually giving it a name: Kwengletarianism.

It’s not cropped up out of nowhere though, as Kibo started building towards this ideology with 2022’s ‘FBFR4: Fuego Baby Furtardo Returns (Sorry 4 Da Longness)’ mixtape, a turbo-charged rap project that eventually disappeared from streaming services after a copyright dispute involving fellow rapper YT .

From then onward, he kept making music without necessarily feeling the need to release it, while booking raves to pay his bills, and eventually ending up with a catalogue of music he felt best represented his ‘origin story’ and that of Kwengletarianism, as it became more apparent to him.

At its core, he explains, the philosophy is about taking the life you already have and making it feel extraordinary.

Growing up in Harrow, at the end of the Bakerloo line in north west London, Kibo looked beyond his surroundings for inspiration.

With his fondness for the films of Mamoru Hosoda ( The Girl Who Leapt Through Time , Summer Wars ), he filtered fantastical influences through an unglamorous reality to create his own sense of utopia.

It’s something anyone can adopt to add a sense of magic to their surroundings.

“Everyone can have their own Kwengletaria,” he says.

K ibo is just as charismatic and quick-witted in person as he is on record, and you can sense his mind whirring like an overheated laptop as he speaks.

He says it feels like 100 tabs open at once, and that the internet permeates everything he does creatively.

However, that density means people don’t always catch what’s serious underneath the jokes.