KING KONG #21

KING KONG is a dynamic platform to showcase ground-breaking artists across art, fashion, film, music and literature. KING KONG demonstrates art’s ability to respond to ideas and events that shape our contemporary experience.

King Kong 21: The Adult Issue

Inside Issue 21, Richie Culver and Mary Anne Hobbs move through memory, music, friendship, and return. Beginning with their first connection through BBC 6 Music and culminating in Unthinkable Festival in Hull, the conversation expands outward from Joy Division and Factory Records to a new Northern current shaped by Rainy Miller, Blackhaine, Space Africa, Iceboy Violet, and Fixed Abode — an artistic landscape reshaping the emotional language of British underground culture.

JADE reflects on survival within the machinery of global pop, where fame consumes and is consumed in return, addictive, seductive, and impossible to fully leave behind. The industry becomes a toxic relationship, both punishment and desire. She moves from a working-class childhood in the North East, shaped by escapism, divas, and performance as refuge, to a self-defined new chapter, confronting the split between who she is and who she performs, and the younger self she still protects within it.

We put Matt Rife in the back of our trunk and went for a ride.
“I’m myself on stage. Just an exaggerated version. Silly, sarcastic, ironic, and honest. If you love me on stage, you’ll love me as a person.”

In this feature, the internet’s most talked-about comedian unpacks modern stand-up, the pressure of selling out arenas, and the balance between performance and self—crowd work, controlled chaos, and the craft of making 20,000 people feel like a 200-seat club. He reflects on stepping into film, learning from collaborators like Owen Wilson, and moving from solo control into a larger creative ecosystem, alongside the growing need for privacy in a distorted spotlight.

Alexis Texas has spent the last two decades existing at the intersection of visibility, projection, and control—an icon shaped as much by public perception as by her own reinvention. Before everyone was a brand, she already understood the mechanics of visibility, emerging from the internet’s first era of mass fantasy with a level of mythology few figures have retained. She belongs to a lineage of hyper-American icons: exaggerated, desired, endlessly reproduced. Known globally for a persona that once felt fixed in the cultural imagination, she now speaks from a place of intentional distance, where image is no longer the center of gravity. What remains is a sharper focus on ownership, authorship, and the private architecture of a life built beyond attention.

Sofia Isella is watching you watch her, under surveillance: the 21-year-old Sofia Isella moves through Something is a shell . — a world where pop instinct collides with industrial pressure, and softness refuses stability.

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