“Cantona is a Quengletarian!” Inside the maximalist, magical mentality of rising London Irish rapper Keebo

A a few Guinnesses for an interview at a local Irish pub, while 26-year-old Harrow rapper Keebo cooks. We’re talking about football. As a child, he preferred to play Fifa Street, where regular players jump off walls to score weird bicycle kicks, over regular realistic FIFA. “If I’m going to play a video game, I want to do something that I can’t do in real life,” he says. He is drawn to the same wonderful footballers: Balotelli, Drogba during his Chelsea career, Ronaldinho and his father’s favorite Eric Cantona: “Oh God, with the collar up, looking like Kanye West?” Kibo then recites Cantona’s 2019 UEFA President’s Award speech to near perfection – a mixture of King Lear and philosophical musings on war and science.

Magic is at the heart of Quengletarianism, “the idea of ​​being in a very gray place and trying to find a prismatic iridescent glow within it,” which is at the heart of Keebo’s sensational album Kwengletaria: Ragamyff. (Cantona? “He’s a Quangletarian to the extreme.”) During his long rise in the London rap scene, canonized by collaborators Skepta, JME and Dave, Keebo has become a rare MC from Harrow, a town that was home to Kate Nash and Jay Paul but has no famous rappers. “It’s amazing,” he says of the lack of rap tradition, “a complete blank slate” that allows him to be as creative as he wants. Quangletaria finds myth in the mundane: on the Bakerloo Dragon track, a routine subway ride turns into a broken-paced roller skating ride aboard the fire-breathing Bakerloo Linear Train. I tell him that my train to Harrow was one of those flame-painted dragons. – Did you have sparks? he asks enthusiastically. “After Stonebridge Park you have sparks!”

We meet midweek and Keebo tells me he’s going to a wrestling match in Dublin this weekend. I ask him who he is watching. “No, I “a fight,” he replies: he’s competing against Irish rapper Lil Skug “to see who’s really ready to take on the responsibility of being Irish champion.” Keebo is 6ft 4in tall, Irish heritage, goatee, mane of hair straight out of a sci-fi movie and a bag of terribly gross bars: “I’ll take your mama’s Butlin’s / And I sure as hell ain’t bluffing / You’re not a bad boy, you’re an Egg McMuffin” You’d back him to win the match on aura alone.

Add references to anime, Pokemon, chicken shops and X-wing fighters, combine that with 16 producers creating beats spanning garage, R&B, donk, grime and jungle, and you get a sense of the scale of Kwengletaria: Ragamyff. “I’m a real maximalist, and a lot of the artists I gravitate towards—Ghostface Killah, MF Doom, Yung Lean—it all comes down to the question: How much can you fit into one thing?” he says.

The all-you-can-eat impulse comes from growing up on the Internet—”I was the kid with a million tabs open and trying to speak with a certain level of eloquence”—and the concept of qualengletarianism dates back to when Keebo’s classmates started peddling pirated Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. “They put even more glitter on it and made it look like it was the most valuable shit in the world,” he says. “I know it’s fake, but this shit looks amazing. It’s the first thing I remember in my life where I looked at something and knew it was valuable.”

Keebo nods to his grime forebears on the album, sampling Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in da Corner on closer Our War Game. “My absorption of dirt was retroactive,” he says. “Going back to 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, it’s cool, but it’s not. Here” While these older bands seemed a long way from Keebo, the Novelist, Lewisham MC behind the modern grime revival, and Quengletaria’s only guest, it was “the first time I was able to tune in to grime sets live and feel like I was there for it,” says Keebo. “It always seemed like he was bringing back the dirt. And moving it forward.”

What’s impressive is how clear, satisfying, and incredibly funny Keebo’s approach to hand-to-hand combat is. He shouts out to Fiona Templeton, an academic at Brunel University (where he gained a first degree in film, drama and media) for giving him a word about what he does: hyperdiction. “It was like someone showed me a brain scan,” he says. These collisions – of genres, references and words – create in his work a new metalanguage of mixed inconsistencies, such as “Courvoir-Sierra Leone” or “Dimitar Burberritov”. They also increase endurance. On Chancer, the mellow grime track midway through the album, Keebo’s criss-crossing patterns unfold over three beats and five merciless verses.

In “Bakerloo Dragon”, Keebo says that he received “charm from mom and gifts from dad.” Eileen, from Limerick, quickly fell in love with John, a drummer from Harrow, when he came to Ireland on holiday. They had a two-year long-distance relationship before she moved to England. “Her whole village had one phone booth, so it said, ‘You must be here at 7 o’clock.’ My dad worked on the BT phone line so he managed to get some things done.”

This made Keebo a true believer in romance. “This is Quangletarianism!” he says. “You have to believe in something, you have to believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel.” Keebo is a third generation member of Harrow’s Irish community and there is a distinctly Irish feel to the project about beliefs, myths, good jokes and finding magic in ordinary objects.

Quengletaria: Ragamyff is about celebrating where you come from, but it’s also about the feeling of being stuck in a place that, even when the iridescent shine has faded, is still gray and boring. Beyond the album and a mixture of viral live clips, Keebo has set his sights beyond Harrow. “I feel like I’ve finally mastered London. [The track] Red Starz was like, “I graduated from London, right?” It’s almost like a post-credits scene – it’s Ryanair: oh man, there are 200 other countries? Curse. There is a decisive moment here: between leaving home and returning. But if you find magic and pride in your base, you can always return to it and recharge. Home is like a charging point.”