We're hosting a free online event exclusively for GUAP community members with FilmAbdi, the self-taught London photographer who's gone from shooting his friends at house parties to being one of the most recognisable names behind Black London's nightlife and culture, in four years.

Curated & Hosted by OURPPLS

Date: Monday 24th August

Time: 6:30pm

To RSVP please sign up below.

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Listen to this playlist whilst reading: ‘Sounds Like Deep House’

Whilst you read this, imagine the sound of a bassline building, the repetitive rhythm, the feeling of being surrounded by strangers who somehow feel like a community. This is “oontz oontz” the sound that many people are hearing everywhere right now. But what does it actually mean?

Society loves a trend. In the age of social media, trends can come and go quicker than one semester at university. A sound can dominate culture overnight, a dance can become global in a matter of days, and suddenly everyone is speaking the same cultural language before moving onto the next thing.

Yet amongst the constant cycle of trends, one sound has returned with undeniable force: electronic music.

As a house music lover through and through, house and dance music have always remained close to my heart. What is fascinating is watching this resurgence happen alongside the new age of social media. TikTok is basically the radio nowadays, and watching the platform transition from indie sounds to house as the soundtrack of the internet has been cinematic.

But this is not just a trend. Dance music has always been evolving.

Deep house, tech house, minimal tech and nostalgic samples have created a unique and exciting space for a new generation discovering electronic music. Genres such as garage, jungle and drum & bass have evolved and forged their own space within the dance revolution we are currently experiencing.

The UK has always been a powerhouse for electronic music. From house and garage to jungle and drum & bass, British communities have constantly transformed sounds and created new movements. What is exciting now is watching these sounds travel globally.

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We’re commissioning a photographer and/or videographer from within our subscriber community to shoot at the Gabriel Moses upcoming talk at the V&A , A Life in the Work of Others, where he sits down with V&A curators to talk through the people and references that shaped his work.

To apply click the link below and fill in the form.

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The world calls it blokecore now.

A football shirt with baggy denim. A vintage jersey with a skirt. A sporty top styled with jewellery, fresh hair, sunglasses, lip gloss, heels or sneakers. Online, it becomes an aesthetic. A moodboard. A trend. Another word added to fashion’s growing dictionary for things communities were already doing before the internet learned how to name them.

But for many African women, the football jersey was never just a trend.

It was match day.

It was the shirt pulled out because the national team was playing. It was the orange of Côte d’Ivoire moving through a city like a shared emotion. It was the girl who did her hair before the game because watching football was also a social event. It was the cousin wearing a jersey with full makeup. The auntie who did not know every player’s name but knew exactly when to shout. The woman who styled a football shirt like it belonged to her wardrobe, not borrowed from a man’s closet.

Long before fashion treated the football jersey as a styling piece, African women understood that match day was already a stage.

Football was never only for the men

Football culture is often narrated through men: the players, the coaches, the pundits, the men arguing in bars, the boys in the street, the fathers passing down team loyalty to their sons. But this has always been an incomplete picture.

Women have always been there.

They were in the living rooms, in the maquis, in the fan zones, in the group chats, in the beauty salons before the game, in the kitchens where food was prepared for people watching, in the streets after a win, in the diaspora apartments where someone had found a streaming link just in time. They were not always framed as the centre of football culture, but they helped create its atmosphere.

And atmosphere is culture.

The match-day girl is not a new invention. She is the woman who knows that football is not only about the score. It is about the preparation, the tension, the collective mood, the outfit, the pictures, the pride, the way a country becomes visible on the body.

She may not perform fandom the way men are expected to. She may not shout the loudest or quote statistics. But she understands the emotional architecture of football. She knows when a match becomes bigger than sport. She knows when a jersey stops being sportswear and becomes identity.

The jersey as a beauty object

There is something powerful about the way women style football shirts because they often soften, sharpen or completely transform the garment.

A jersey can be oversized and casual. It can be tucked into jeans. It can be cropped, cinched, layered, worn with a mini skirt, a maxi skirt, tailored trousers, hoops, braids, lashes, perfume, a fresh manicure. It can be worn to watch the match, but also to be seen watching the match.

That distinction matters.

For the match-day girl, the jersey is not only a symbol of support. It is a beauty object. It enters a wider ritual of getting ready. Hair, makeup, scent, nails, jewellery, shoes and attitude all become part of the look. The shirt may come from football, but the final silhouette belongs to her.

This is where African women’s relationship to football style becomes especially interesting. In many African cultures, presentation is not superficial. It is social language. The way you dress tells people where you are going, what you respect, how you want to be read and what kind of mood you are carrying. Even casualness is styled. Even effortlessness has effort behind it.

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In a fragmented digital zeitgeist such as ours, the question of what “fame” and “popularity” really mean is constantly up for debate. But beyond definitions and metrics, there is a more familiar feeling that seems to persist. The bittersweet taste of watching something once specific, once yours, become everything.

It is not a new experience, but it feels sharper now. In a culture shaped by algorithms and constant visibility, niches do not just grow. They dissolve into the mainstream, often losing the very context that made them meaningful in the first place.

As I sat on the train home from the office, my brain in its usual overdrive, I came across a TikTok about Ryan Coogler disliking soda but “getting involved with that” once he realised you could mix the flavours. Among Black Americans, that phrase has now taken on a life of its own, and I liked it immediately because it reminded me of a similar Nigerian expression, “involve me.”

While I was enjoying that connection between diasporic speech, it brought me back to something more familiar: the bastardisation of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) as “Gen Z slang.” A dialect shaped by generations of Black speakers gets picked up on TikTok, stripped of context, and reintroduced as something new, something unserious, something disposable. The people who built it are left out of the conversation entirely. It is nothing new in a society that consistently leans towards whiteness as the default and treats origins as optional.

A similar pattern has played out more recently with Charli XCX and her “Brat” era. What began as a specific world, NYC and London party girls, small circles, a kind of cultural intimacy, quickly expanded beyond itself. These were girls who built identities in exclusive spaces while still holding a quiet influence over the cities around them. As she puts it in ‘Von Dutch,’ “cult classic but I still pop.” It is a very particular position to occupy, or at least it was before the album reached a new level of virality through the TikTok dance trend for “Apple.”

With the scale of the Brat rollout, the “rich model partygirl” aesthetic became just another one to try on. And in her own words, “if everything is Brat… then what really is Brat?” At this point, it is fair to ask whether Charli and the people who shaped that world still have the authority to define it. Sarah Thornton (1995) describes subcultural capital as something that confers status within a specific group. Once that group disappears into the mainstream, that same capital starts to lose its value and cultural cache.

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Welcome to GUAP’s weekly newsletter.

We have curated a selection of creative opportunities for you to digest. We know how difficult and overwhelming it can be to find opportunities. So as a way to support your creative journey we have separated this newsletter into different mediums. We hope you find something that resonates with you and helps lighten the load.

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“Woah, please don’t make me
Sit down
’Cause I just got to Heaven
Sit down
Gonna walk around
Sit down, servant, and rest a while, sit down”

The words vibrate through internal speakers. But they are singing to me. For I am standing amongst the voices of ancestors, whose prayers are answered through my existence.

The artwork in front of me is a glazed wood staircase that commands the centre of the gallery space. Two clay vessels rest on each wooden step. This moment feels similar to kneeling in church, surrounded by the hymns of a choir. The song playing is a collection of sounds from the True Blue Plantation and its descendants, “Sit Down Servant”, performed at a 2022 funeral service.

Their voices, now immortalised, dance around the walls of Artspace, Woolloomooloo, carrying the weight of generations through an internal speaker.

A worker nearby shares a quiet reflection, acknowledging the transformative power of the artwork: “It’s amazing how the clay of all the ashes of the people that have passed away, which are used in her piece, have now been turned into a vessel holding her ancestors”.

For in this space, art becomes more than mere expression. It becomes a witness to the complexities of history, a tangible manifestation of the prayers of all those who came before.

Adebunmi Gbadebo, born in 1992 in Livingston, New Jersey, is a visual artist known for her sculptures, paintings, prints, and paper creations, all crafted from human hair sourced from individuals of the African diaspora. Rejecting traditional artistic mediums, Gbadebo embraces hair as a means to centre her people and their histories within her art.

Her work has been showcased at the 24th Biennale of Sydney, which brings together approximately 96 artists and collectives from across more than 50 countries and territories.

For Gbadebo, the process of curating her art installation of the two vessels, “Sam 2023” and “Adam 2023”, and the staircase they are placed on, is deeply personal and special.

(Sam 2023 on the top step and Adam 2023 on the lower step. Photo taken by Danielle Osifo.)

“Originally, I wanted the stairs to be made by my cousin Benny. My cousin Benny is a descendant of True Blue Plantation. He’s the family member who is responsible for literally building bridges over waterways that are giving us access to the burial grounds. He’s also the relative who has built a lot of staircases. A lot of these burial grounds that my enslaved ancestors are buried on are on these hills, and a lot of the descendants are older and elderly people. It’s quite difficult for them to access the burial ground. So Benny has built staircases from the road to the burial grounds, which literally gives us access to our ancestors,” she explains.

However, due to cost constraints, the staircase was built in Australia. Despite this, Gbadebo still wanted to honour Benny’s labour, which is physically evident in the land. This land is a space where many of her ancestors, including enslaved and newly emancipated ancestors, have built structures that have been knocked down, torn down, or burnt down, making it inaccessible.

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That’s …

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The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland had just become defunct, the township jazz (quartets) era was coming to an end, creatives in suits and ties were being replaced with bell bottoms and “Linda shoes”, the iconic high-heeled platform shoes that defined the hippie stylish era of Zimbabwean township rock. The 70s in Zimbabwe saw the resurgence of township rock music fronted by black African youths birthed from townships through suppression and segregation. The influence came from the height of the Anglo-American hippie culture in the 60s, which was taking over the world by storm. Colonization being the main theme in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), the current regime made it a mandate for the radio stations, record bars, and anywhere you could listen to sound on a speaker to be filled with Western music, including rock music. Rock music in itself is birthed and driven by rebelliousness. It was never a problem to the colonizers for Western rock to be filled in the system because the “rage” wasn’t directly against their “machine”. It all changed when township youths picked up guitars and drums, and that same Western rock music fueled Zimbabwean township rock to be a drive for the resistance.

Wells Fargo, a heavy rock band from Bulawayo formed in the 1970s, created an anthem called “Watch Out”, translated as “Hokoyo” in Shona, one of our indigenous languages, which coincidentally another song also exists with that same name that was revolutionary. Watch Out, the raw version of it, was banned before it even existed. The 7-inch singles were sabotaged and not properly moved because of its political instigations. The original lyrics to it went as “Watch out, have gun will travel, freedom is coming”, which was a direct stint to the then Rhodesian government. The latter recording, the “cleaner version”, which they were suggested to re-record upon the banning of the original, went as “Watch out, big storm is coming”, and was partly tolerated but later on banned as well. It managed to circulate among the people, fueling the guerrillas who were part of the resistance. Wells Fargo faced police brutality, spies’ invasion of their concerts, record sabotage, and unlawful arrest throughout their career in the 70s.

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Everyone arrives alone, even when they come with friends.

You recognise faces from Instagram before you recognise names. Someone whose work you’ve admired for months is standing five feet away. You think about introducing yourself, rehearse the first sentence in your head, then decide they’re probably busy. They do the same with someone else. By the end of the night, you’ve both gone home convinced nobody wanted to talk.

Events are full of people looking for community while pretending they don’t need it.

We orbit the people we already know, waiting for conversation to happen naturally, as though community is something that appears on its own.

The problem isn’t the people.

It’s the setting.

EKO League changes that setting and places people in a situation where there is no choice but to interact.

One by one, the players arrive, some in groups and some alone, vaguely recognizing one another from Instagram or brief introductions at a previous event.

But this time, the first question is not, “What do you do?”

It’s:

“Are you on my team?”

“Who wants to play goalie?”

“How often do you play?”

Football gives strangers something to care about together. Before knowing each other, people are already teasing bad shots and praising good skills. Introductions are no longer the priority and happen almost accidentally.

Suddenly, the photographer is frantically asking the musician to track back, and the fashion student sends the brand owner to the shops. Someone who usually has a hard time approaching people is organizing their team from the back, as if they’ve known everyone for years.

Nobody chose not to be awkward.

There was simply no room for it.

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A decade ago, Afrobeats was still treated as a niche sound in the UK, it was the soundtrack to crowded house parties, family celebrations, and weddings, played through speakers long before mainstream radio stations gave it attention. For many African diaspora communities across cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester, Afrobeats was more than just music, it was a connection to culture, identity and home. At the time, no one could have predicted that the same sound would eventually dominate UK charts, festivals and pop culture. Now, it is heard everywhere. From summer chart hits, to festival headline sets, Afrobeats has become one of the defining influences on British pop music, reshaping how UK artists sound and how the industry understands global music culture.

The influence of African diaspora communities in the UK, club culture and social media has grown the genre of Afrobeats. Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram have made global music far more accessible giving artists like Rema, Burna Boy, Ruger, and many others, more global recognition, particularly within the UK. These artists have now reached British listeners without relying on traditional radio stations. As the genre gained popularity online and in clubs, collaborations with UK and international artists helped push Afrobeats even further into the mainstream, transforming it from a niche sound into one of the biggest influences on modern UK pop music.

To fully explore the rise of Afrobeats in the UK, you must go back to 2012 when D’Banj released ‘Oliver Twist’ and reached number 9 on the UK Official Singles Chart. He was the first Afrobeats artist to score a UK top 10, the success of this song showed that Afrobeats could compete commercially within the British music industry and that helped pave the way for later artists like Burna Boy and Wizkid to achieve mainstream success in the UK. Next arriving onto the scene was Fuse ODG in 2013 with his hit songs ‘Million Pound Girl’, ‘Azonto’ and ‘Antenna’. He is a London born artist who grew up in Ghana and has musical influences from both places. Through his TINA (This Is New Africa) movement, and charting music, he changed cultural perspectives of Africa and its music and, alongside D’Banj,pioneered modern Afrobeats to the UK mainstream. Their fusions of West African rhythms and London slang laid the blueprint for the sub genre, Afroswing.

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TO SIGN UP CLICK HERE

SIGN UP FORM WILL BE CLOSED AT 50 - SO GET YOURS QUICKLY.

We’ve got the first drop of 50 paid subscriptions to give away to celebrate our new launch.

Here’s what you get access to:

• The full GUAP Daily: five deep-dive articles/video essays written by and for the culture, a week straight to your inbox, Monday to Friday.

• The Sunday opportunities newsletter - jobs, freelance roles, commissions, casting calls and industry openings every week

• Monthly online events - masterclasses, workshops, live interviews and community gatherings ran by OURPPLS.

• Discounts/Perks from our community partners

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your

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I’ve always believed that the most interesting artists (and honestly, the most interesting people) are the ones shaped by many worlds at once. The ones who never fit neatly into one box, the most compelling creativity is intersectional. I’ve felt that in myself for as long as I can remember, even before I had the language for it. It comes from letting every influence, every phase, every obsession shape the way you see and make art. And maybe that’s why this moment in artistry feels so exciting to me: because it finally celebrates the kind of layered, intersectional creativity that used to be dismissed as “too much”.

There’s a quiet kind of rebellion happening in pop culture, not loud or performative, but intentional. A return to the sacred art of crafting something whole. The role of the artist has radically transformed. No longer is it enough to simply create great music. In an industry obsessed with speed and virality, to stand out now is to be multidimensional. To hold attention in a sea of sameness is to become something more: a visionary, a curator, a storyteller.

At the forefront of this movement are three artists who are reminding us that vision still matters.

What sets these artists apart is how they take that same layered approach and extend it beyond the music, into performance, styling, visuals, rollout strategy, and world-building.

They aren’t just releasing songs.

They’re curating experiences.

Doechii, Bad Bunny, and Sabrina Carpenter couldn’t be more different on paper, different sounds, different roots, different worlds. But what unites them is a shared refusal to do anything halfway. They’re not just dropping singles or curating vibes. They’re building language. Telling stories and honouring the greats while pushing the form forward.

The most impactful artists aren’t just releasing music. They’re crafting interconnected narratives that span across sound, image, performance, and public persona. This is where intersectionality becomes crucial, not as a trend, but as a creative language. It’s the practice of embedding meaning through references, symbols, and recurring motifs that connect everything an artist does.

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Welcome to GUAP’s weekly newsletter.

We have curated a selection of creative opportunities for you to digest. We know how difficult and overwhelming it can be to find opportunities. So as a way to support your creative journey we have separated this newsletter into different mediums. We hope you find something that resonates with you and helps lighten the load.

Read more

Fashion media has developed a lazy habit of treating “viral” and “culturally relevant” as interchangeable terms, when they describe two entirely different relationships between a creative and an audience. Virality is a number, measurable and finite, the kind of thing that appears in a screenshot and gets quoted in a press release. Cultural currency is something closer to a position, the kind of standing that exists whether or not anyone is currently watching. Confusing the two has real consequences for who gets remembered a year later, who gets funded for the next idea, and who gets taken seriously once the initial noise has settled.

In 2022, Heidi Klum hosted her annual Halloween party dressed as a giant worm - a costume so unexpected and elaborately constructed that it dominated fashion and entertainment coverage for weeks. She described it as one of the proudest, strangest creations of her career. Three years on, the costume rarely surfaces in fashion conversation. Nobody studies it as a creative choice or returns to it as a reference point for anything. It achieved enormous visibility, then disappeared from cultural memory at almost the same speed it arrived - a number with nothing built underneath it to hold the weight once attention moved on.

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TO SIGN UP CLICK HERE

SIGN UP FORM WILL BE CLOSED AT 50 - SO GET YOURS QUICKLY.

We’ve got the first drop of 50 tickets to give away for an exciting event with Gabriel Moses at V&A East Museum. Taking place on Thursday 27th August from 7pm - 8.30pm, this will be an evening where the photographer and director sits down with V&A curators to talk through the people, places and relationships that shaped how he sees.

Moses directed his first campaign for Nike at eighteen. By 2022, his editorial shoot with Pa Salieu made him the youngest photographer to shoot a Dazed cover. He’s since photographed Skepta, Dave and Wizkid, shot campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Dior and Vogue, and worked with Jay-Z, Rihanna, Pharrell, Solange and Lauryn Hill. Last year he designed the Brit Award trophy, putting him in a small line of British designers including Vivienne Westwood, Yinka Ilori and Slawn to have shaped it. His frames are instantly recognisable, deep colour and thick texture, built out of his Nigerian heritage and a south London childhood.

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

For more information/submit a story - click here.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber and gain access to:

• The full GUAP Daily: five deep-dive articles/video essays written by and for the culture, a week straight to your inbox, Monday to Friday.

• The Sunday opportunities newsletter - jobs, freelance roles, commissions, casting calls and industry openings every week

• Monthly online events - masterclasses, workshops, live interviews and community gatherings ran by OURPPLS.

• Discounts/Perks from our community partners including Tunecore,

For only £6 a month (price of a coffee) you get access to the opportunities, the knowledge and the community that keeps you close to the culture. Whether you are building something or you just care about what is happening - this is where you want to be. And every membership puts money directly into the hands of the writers and creators telling the stories that actually matter.

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To some this title could be extremely vague or some would simply nod understandably. From the first Billboard Music Awards, The Grammy Awards or charting at Top 40 , a musician’s place in mainstream was always down to one consistent factor. Fangirls. You could also say “groupies”, “entorages” or “stans”. Usually, those terms are used in a manner of downgrade, like if you’re a dedicated fan you’re immediately a wacko. Yes, in some cases that may be correct, but what would Micheal Jackson be without the girls, without your mum?!

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Today is a big day for us.

10 years ago we started GUAP with one idea. Find the stories that weren’t being told. Platform the talent the world hadn’t caught up with yet. Tell it properly. That was it. That was the whole thing. Today we go back to that.

We are bringing back true journalism in culture.

Everyone is chasing clicks, algorithms and the fastest take. We are going the opposite direction. GUAP is becoming the home for real cultural storytelling - long-form, honest and rooted in the communities and creative worlds we cover. Writers and video creators who have something genuinely worth saying, covering the people, the communities and the moments that deserve more than thirty seconds

The New Era

We are proud to announce that GUAP now officially lives on Substack and with this we are introducing a subscription tier that not only pays contributors but gives our subscribers access to exclusive weekly free and paid opportunities, monthly free events, and keeps independent journalism alive.

Here’s what you get as a subscriber:

1. The GUAP Daily - one new article every weekday straight to your inbox. Emerging writers, creators and storytellers covering music, film, fashion, sport, art and culture. Discovery-led, honest and told properly.

2. The Sunday opportunities newsletter (Curated by The Isle Of CC) - every Sunday before the week begins a curated newsletter with jobs, commissions, casting calls and industry openings lands directly in your inbox. Exclusive to members.

3. Free monthly online events (Curated by OURPPLS) - masterclasses, live interviews, feedback sessions and community gatherings every month.

4. Partner perks - discount codes & offers from our long list of cultural partners exclusive to our members.

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How it works

Become a paid subscriber for only £6 a month and get full access to everything - all five daily articles, the Sunday opportunities newsletter and free monthly events.

Your subscription also directly funds the writers and creators behind the journalism, giving emerging storytellers a real platform to grow and thrive. Every piece is co-authored with the contributor and cross-promoted across our channels so when you follow and engage with their work you are helping build their platform too. This is journalism that gives back to the people making it.

We have spent 10 years finding the stories the world hadn’t caught up with yet. This is us making sure those stories have a home for the next 10.

GUAP

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If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

For more information/submit a story - click here.