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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Following the release of their global campaign, “The A-Z of Timberland”, Timberland will launch a pop-up space on in London from Thursday 17th - 19th September during London Fashion Week.

We would like to giveaway a ticket to you and a plus 1 to attend the private closing party in partnership with Balamii taking place Tonight, 6pm-10pm.

Enjoy cocktails and performances by Saiming, JD.Reid and Heléna Star.

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“Touch grass.”

It’s the internet’s favourite insult, urging people to step away from their phone, log off and come back to reality. But beneath the meme lies a fundamental, biological truth that we often forget in the rush of everyday life: we need nature to survive.

Spending time outdoors isn’t about escapism; it’s basic physiology. Getting out into open space strips back our mental clutter, lowers cortisol, and gives our overburdened nervous systems a chance to reset. Nature offers fresh air, warm sunlight, and a physical stillness you simply cannot buy in a city.

But what happens when ‘touching grass’ is treated as an exclusive privilege rather than a basic human right?

For so many of us raised in concrete postcodes, our proximity to Mother Nature is limited to depressing, dried up patches of ‘grass’ framed by dual carriageways and council blocks. Even these tiny spaces come with conditions. Some ironically guarded by rusted ‘No Ball Games’ signs that tell us our play, our laughter, and our presence are unacceptable. Growing up around those signs, we learn early that public space isn’t really ours to occupy freely.

This environmental deprivation isn’t an accident; it’s by design. Research from Friends of the Earth reveals that Black and Asian communities in the UK are twice as likely to live in green deprived areas. We are systematically walled off from the natural world before we even get the chance to explore it. When your daily horizon consists of grey tarmac and beige flats, the idea that nature is readily available to everyone feels like a cruel joke.

When we do try to venture to the countryside, the geographic, financial, and social divides become impossible to ignore. According to the UK Government, only a meek 1% of visitors to national parks come from Black, Asian, or minority ethnic backgrounds—despite us making up around a fifth of the nation’s population.

Being in the 1% is also a very physical feeling. It’s the uncomfortable experience of stepping off a rural train platform and immediately feeling the weight of the ‘white stare’.

The British countryside has been culturally coded for centuries as middle-class territory—a fantasy of national identity that rarely includes us. Walking through those quiet villages, you aren’t just a hiker enjoying the scenery; you become a hyper-visible outsider. You feel the stares from pub gardens and the lingering glances from passing cars. You end up carrying an invisible mental tax just to go for a stroll, constantly aware of your body in a space that feels inherently unwelcoming.

This isn’t a coincidence; it’s history. When the Windrush generation and South Asian migrants landed in Britain, they didn’t head for the countryside. They settled in concrete, industrial hubs like London, Birmingham, and the West Midlands—places where the work was, and where there was safety in numbers.

Back then, rural Britain wasn’t just unfamiliar; it was very hostile. Unsurprisingly, for many first generation immigrants, survival took priority over leisure. The idea of going hiking or ‘exploring nature’ was a luxury our elders couldn’t afford—neither in their pockets nor in their peace of mind. Over generations, that necessity morphed into an assumed cultural norm: we don’t do the outdoors. We internalised the idea that the countryside wasn’t built for us, so we stayed where it felt safe—within the boundaries of the city.

This disconnect is engineered early, long before adulthood. I spoke to a teacher at an inner-city school in Coventry who told me that, while school trips used to bridge that gap, budget cuts mean inner-city kids are getting out into nature less and less. For many of those kids, a single trip just an hour down the road is their first time ever seeing a sheep in real life, standing on a rolling hill, or catching sight of the ocean.

The transformation when these kids step onto open land is immediate. Freed from hyper-surveilled streets and the rigid boundaries of urban life, they can climb trees, run carelessly, and let their imaginations take over. That uninhibited play builds creativity, resilience, trial and error, and an innate respect for the environment.

The same spark was reiterated by Polly, a volunteer at Hackney City Farm: “The kids are in a state of pure wonder,” she told me. “What surprises me most is how fearless they are around the animals. We have these massive cows, and the kids are tiny—but they don’t care. They’re just filled with pure curiosity.”

That wonder is vital for child development and how young people map their place in the world. When you deny children access to those environments, you shrink their idea of what belongs to them. You teach them early on to limit their expectations of the world outside their neighbourhood.

For young people from the Global Majority across Britain, the pressure is doubled. We live in an era dominated by hustle culture, hyper-visibility, and digital exhaustion. We’re expected to constantly perform and work twice as hard, all while navigating spaces where our identities are under a microscope.

In this context, taking time to do ‘nothing’ in nature becomes a radical act. Rest is a form of resistance against a system that measures our value purely by our productivity.

Except now, the script is being flipped.

Disrupting this long-standing exclusion is a vibrant wave of diaspora-led creative collectives. Groups like Flock Together, Muslim Hikers, and Black Girls Hike aren’t waiting for an invitation—they’re actively taking up space and redefining what the UK outdoors looks like.

By offering safety in numbers, these groups strip away the fear of hyper-visibility and the awkwardness of being ‘the only one’. They provide a space where people don’t have to justify their presence or explain themselves. They prove that stepping into the countryside isn’t about seeking permission from a white counterpart—it’s an act of radical rest, a rejection of burnout, and the reclamation of a birthright that was ours all along.

At the end of the day, ‘touching grass’ shouldn’t be a luxury item. But right now in the UK, the stats and our own everyday experiences say otherwise. Access to nature has been quietly sliced up by race and class for decades. The difference now? A new generation isn’t asking for permission anymore. We’re stepping onto the land on our own terms, ignoring the side-eyes, and taking back what was always ours.

Reclaiming our space outdoors isn’t about waiting for an invitation. It’s about pulling up, breathing in, and remembering the countryside was never meant to be private property.

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.

Subscribe now

At 28, 30 stopped feeling like a birthday and started feeling like a deadline.

My anxiety about turning 30 may be personal, but it has not developed in isolation. Online, success has become something we are expected to perform publicly, and 30 is often presented as the age by which our careers, finances, relationships and identities should make sense. For Black women, this timeline can carry another layer: the expectation to overcome structural barriers, honour our families’ sacrifices and become examples for those coming behind us.

wo years left and far too much life to figure out.

The life I thought I would have

When I imagined turning 30, I pictured myself at the peak of my career. I would have my dream job, earn enough money to enjoy my life and experience financial freedom. I would have my own car, my own home, investments and a successful relationship.

Essentially, I thought I would have it all together.

Now that I am approaching 30, the reality looks different. I have only recently started investing. I am progressing in my career, but I am also transitioning toward something that still needs time to build. I have not reached the financial freedom I imagined; I am single, and there are still parts of my identity I am figuring out.

I understand myself far better than I did in my mid-twenties. Yet when I focus on the milestones I have not reached, it becomes difficult to recognise how far I have come.

Where did this timeline come from?

Let’s not lie: social media has influenced it.

Online, approaching 30 often looks like finally having everything together. You have the salary, the beautifully decorated home, the carefully planned holidays and the independence to live alone. You have a space that belongs entirely to you, where you can rediscover yourself before considering marriage or cohabitation.

The women we compare ourselves to can appear to have achieved all of this and more. There is nothing wrong with admiring their success, but we often compare our entire reality with the parts of their lives they have chosen to show us.

We see the announcement, not always the years of uncertainty that came before it. We see the new home, but not necessarily the assistance, sacrifices or setbacks behind the purchase. We see the dream career, but not every rejection, sleepless night or moment of doubt.

My generation has experienced adulthood with unprecedented access to other people’s lives. We are not only living our own; we are watching thousands of other people live theirs at the same time. There is always another person to compare ourselves with and another milestone we seemingly should have reached already.

But social media is only part of the story.

My expectations also came from my community and from wanting more for myself than circumstances allowed my parents. I wanted to become the first person in my family to achieve certain things: the first to buy a home, the first to reach particular career goals and one of the first to complete two degrees, including a master’s.

For me, success has never felt entirely individual. It carries the hope of making my parents proud, creating opportunities that were previously unavailable to my family, and showing those coming after me what may be possible. Reaching a milestone can feel like evidence that the sacrifices made before me meant something.

That ambition came from love and hope. However, when your progress feels connected to an entire family’s progress, an ordinary delay can begin to feel like a much bigger failure.

The difficulty of being the first

The difficult thing about being the first is that there is not always someone around you who has already reached the place you are trying to go.

You may inherit ambition without inheriting the blueprint, professional connections or financial knowledge needed to navigate it. Without direct access to people who have achieved similar goals, you often have to build from the bottom up. You discover what works, make mistakes and learn how to correct them. When something goes wrong, you have to find the strength to recover and continue.

Being the first can also make you feel responsible for those who come after you. I want to be an example, but I also want to remain accessible. I want people to be able to approach me for support, guidance and honest advice.

For some Black women, success comes with an unspoken expectation that we will hold the door open once we enter rooms our families or communities have historically been excluded from. That responsibility can be meaningful, but it can also make personal ambition feel like a community assignment.

When strength becomes an expectation

Black women are frequently praised for being strong, resilient and able to overcome difficult circumstances. While resilience can be empowering, constantly being described as strong can leave little room for uncertainty, softness or asking for help.

When I feel behind, I am not only confronting my personal expectations. I am also confronting the idea that I should be able to handle pressure without letting anyone see its effect on me.

For some Black women, this exists alongside the message that we must work twice as hard to reach the same places as others. In careers, business, and creative industries, many of us have encountered situations where we felt required to prove our competence, increase our visibility, and navigate biases associated with being both Black and female.

We can be celebrated for breaking ceilings while receiving little acknowledgement of the emotional exhaustion of repeatedly entering spaces not designed with us in mind.

When achievement still feels insufficient

I have completed two degrees. I have entered the technology industry, started developing my writing career, and created my own platform to pursue my passion for the creative space.

Those are significant achievements.

However, I devoted much of my early and mid-twenties to education. Because so much of my energy went into that area, I did not have the same knowledge or capacity to focus on everything else.

I was learning how to enter professional spaces while also trying to understand financial systems that were rarely discussed around me. I did not grow up surrounded by investment conversations, property strategies or people who could show me how wealth is built. I have had to begin developing that knowledge for myself.

This is why comparing outcomes without comparing access is misleading. Two people may be the same age but begin with completely different levels of knowledge, support, security and opportunity.

When I compare myself to someone who spent their twenties building wealth or pursuing a completely different path, it becomes easy to feel behind. But that comparison ignores what I was building during the same period.

My progress is not insignificant simply because it happened in a different order.

Releasing 30 as a deadline

If I stopped treating 30 as a benchmark, I would give myself more credit.

I would recognise the work it took to complete two degrees, establish myself in technology, begin transitioning towards the career I want and create a space for my writing. I would stop letting the absence of a single achievement cancel out everything I have already accomplished.

A healthier definition of success would include more than money, property and relationship status. It would include mental stability, positive relationships, and a community that encourages me to reach places I might not have considered on my own.

It would also include contentment not as an excuse to stop growing, but as the ability to appreciate where I am while continuing to work towards where I want to be.

I do not want to abandon ambition. I want to release the belief that ambition must follow a perfect timeline.

Black women should not have to carry everybody else’s burdens. Nor should working twice as hard become the measure of our worth. We deserve examples of Black womanhood that include rest, uncertainty, reinvention and journeys that take longer than expected. We should be allowed to become without constantly turning our lives into proof of resilience.

We can honour our families, support our communities and remain ambitious without treating every delayed milestone as a personal failure.

The next generation needs honest examples of women who discuss how long meaningful things can take, acknowledge that progress includes setbacks, and understand that longevity is more valuable than a single fleeting moment of recognition.

There will always be another goal and another level to reach. If we do not learn to value the process, arriving will simply leave us searching for our next high.

Approaching 30 is not the end of becoming. This isn’t the final version of who we are.

It is simply another beginning.

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.

Subscribe now

We’re hosting a free online event exclusively for GUAP community members with Tobi Kyeremateng, an award-winning cultural producer and founder of Black Ticket Project, which has distributed over 35,000 tickets to working-class young Black people across theatre, festivals and exhibitions. She’s also co-curator of the Barbican’s Project a Black Planet events and gatherings programme.

Session Topic

How Tobi Kyeremateng navigated working with a cultural institution to curate ‘Project a Black Planet’: a deep dive into how she approached curating within the Barbican, exploring cultural institutions in the UK, their relationship with Black audiences and artists, and the role of public programming, creative engagement and creative learning teams.

Curated & Hosted by OURPPLS

Date: Monday 21st September

Time: 6:30pm - 7:30pm

To RSVP please sign up below.

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In 1984, Jim Jannard was driving along California’s Pacific Coast Highway when sunlight began entering his sunglasses from the side. The problem seemed banal until he compared them with the motocross goggles he had been developing. The goggles covered the face properly. The sunglasses did not.

So he went home and made something new.

The first prototype for what became Oakley’s Eyeshade was assembled from a Lexan goggle lens, a coat hanger and electrical tape. It looked less like an accessory than a piece of sporting equipment that had escaped its intended environment. Oakley would spend the following decades turning that attitude into a design language: wraparound lenses, sculptural frames, technical materials, objects that seemed to belong to a future in which sports equipment no longer had to apologise for looking strange.

Fifteen years later, a footballer walked onto a pitch wearing a pair of them.

And suddenly, the history of Oakley became entangled with the history of Edgar Davids.

There is something almost perversely appropriate about the fact that the most recognisable accessory in Davids’ career was not chosen because he wanted to look distinctive.

He needed it.

Davids developed glaucoma after a series of eye injuries in 1995 and underwent surgery. By 1999, he was playing in protective glasses. He first wore them publicly for the Netherlands against Belgium in September of that year. The orange-tinted lenses were functional too. Davids later explained that the colour helped him distinguish the white ball against the green pitch.

The object had a medical purpose.

Davids gave it a cultural one.

By the time Euro 2000 arrived, the glasses had become so inseparable from him that Le Monde was already writing about the strange spectacle of a Juventus midfielder walking around Amsterdam in black wraparound frames and orange lenses. The newspaper noted that the original medical necessity had developed into something else: Davids had simply grown attached to them.

That is one of the great accidents in football style.

Something happens to your body, you find a way to accommodate it, and eventually the thing that was supposed to make you less conspicuous becomes the first thing everyone notices.

But the glasses only worked because there was already an Edgar Davids underneath them.

He had been building that character for years.

Born in Paramaribo, Suriname, in 1973 and raised in the Netherlands, Davids belonged to a generation of Dutch footballers whose presence complicated the country’s increasingly polished image of itself. The Netherlands of the 1990s was often sold abroad through the elegance of Total Football, Ajax academies and an almost architectural idea of how football should be played. Davids represented another side of that story: Surinamese heritage, Amsterdam street football, Black Dutch identity, basketball, hip-hop and an appetite for everything that existed outside the conventional football curriculum.

His world was larger than football.

A remarkable 1999 profile by Simon Kuper captures this better than most biographies do. Kuper describes Davids as an autodidact obsessed with basketball players and rappers, someone who collected tricks rather than football trivia. When he was excluded from the Dutch squad for the 1994 World Cup, he spent the tournament playing on Amsterdam playgrounds and practising things he had seen on television.

That detail is revealing.

Davids wasn’t simply learning football from football, he was absorbing culture.

And you can see it in the way he eventually looked.

The dreadlocks were part of it. The jewellery was part of it. The glasses were part of it. The clothes were part of it. None of these elements existed in isolation because Davids did not seem interested in the idea that a footballer had to have one carefully approved version of himself.

He was curious, confrontational, occasionally difficult, and incredibly good.

At Ajax, Louis van Gaal gave him the nickname that would follow him for the rest of his career: the Pitbull. It was not particularly poetic, but it was accurate. Davids was tenacious, aggressive and relentless in midfield, a player whose size was almost irrelevant to the amount of territory he could occupy.

He won the UEFA Cup with Ajax in 1992 and the Champions League in 1995. After a difficult period at Milan, he moved to Juventus in December 1997 and became one of the most important players in Marcello Lippi’s midfield. By the late 1990s, he was no longer simply one of the young products of Ajax’s academy. He was one of the defining midfielders in European football.

The Juventus years are where the visual lore really crystallised.

There was Zidane, all height and grace, making the game appear almost weightless.

There was Del Piero, with his immaculate technical precision and cultivated Italian elegance.

And then there was Davids.

Shorter. Faster. Dreadlocked. Goggles on. Legs constantly moving. Tackling as though possession were something that had been personally stolen from him.

He looked almost futuristic in a team whose image was otherwise rooted in the grandeur of European football.

The contrast mattered because Davids wasn’t beautiful in the traditional footballing sense. He was compelling.

That is a different quality. Beauty asks you to look, compulsion makes you keep looking. And trully, his personality helped.

The same 1999 Kuper profile begins with Davids telling the journalist that he is badly dressed. He had apparently done this before. The article describes a player who was aggressive, proud, volatile and extremely certain of his own judgement. At one point he approached tennis player Richard Krajicek in an Amsterdam bar, introduced himself despite being unknown to him and confidently announced that he would soon be playing for Holland and driving a big car.

It sounds almost fictional, but that is the thing about Davids. He had the peculiar quality of somebody who seemed to have already imagined his own mythology.

And fashion, for him, was not a decorative afterthought.

He understood clothes as another form of language.

In 1999, the same year his goggles were becoming inseparable from his footballing identity, Davids founded Monta Soccer in Amsterdam.

The timing is extraordinary.

The contemporary relationship between football and fashion can make it difficult to remember how divided those worlds once were. Performance clothing belonged to sport. Streetwear belonged somewhere else. A footballer might wear expensive trainers and denim away from the pitch, then change into a tracksuit for training. The two wardrobes had different purposes and different ideas about who they were for.

Davids thought that separation was ridiculous.

He later described street football as inseparable from fashion and said that, when he was playing, the options were essentially limited to tracksuits that made players look as though they were on their way to the gym. Monta was designed to occupy the space between on-pitch performance and off-pitch lifestyle.

The reaction to the brand was telling.

People did not know what category it belonged to, was it sport or was it lifestyle?

That uncertainty is almost a perfect description of Davids himself.

He was a footballer who wanted to understand fashion, a sportsman interested in design.

A Dutch player born in Suriname who became synonymous with Italian football.

A man whose most famous accessory came from a medical condition but became a marker of personal style.

A player whose image was aggressive while his creative interests were surprisingly expansive.

The categories kept failing him, but Davids seemed to enjoy that.

Years later, he took the fashion interest further. While living in London, he studied at Central Saint Martins, learning about design, materials and the business behind fashion. Forbes described the transition from football into fashion as organic, pointing out that Davids had already created Monta more than a decade before pursuing formal fashion education. He later developed Monta Heritage, a more refined continuation of the original concept.

That part of his story is often treated as a footnote.

It shouldn’t be.

Because it changes the way we understand everything that came before it.

Davids wasn’t a footballer who happened to dress well, he was somebody genuinely interested in the mechanics of style. He wanted to understand why things worked.

In a 2016 interview about fashion, photography and surrealism, he spoke about learning the entire creative process at Central Saint Martins, from concepts and drawing to materials. He also designed shoes, working through the process from the initial idea to the factory.

There is a particular intelligence in that trajectory.

Most athletes become interested in fashion because fashion becomes interested in them while Davids seems to have gone in the opposite direction.

He was already looking. This is perhaps why his image feels surprisingly contemporary now.

Football has become one of fashion’s most productive cultural territories. Players are no longer merely photographed in their uniforms. Their arrival at the stadium can generate almost as much attention as the match. Their clothes become editorial material. Football shirts move through streetwear. Luxury brands sign players. Players become collaborators, ambassadors, designers and, increasingly, brands in their own right.

Davids himself has spoken about how different the landscape would have been for him today. When he was playing, dressing rooms were much more uniform. Social media has made every player’s clothing visible, allowing footballers to express themselves in ways that would have been less noticeable in his era. He said, rather tellingly, that he would have had “a ball” with today’s freedom.

Of course he would.

Imagine Edgar Davids in 2026. He would have been unbearable, and probably brilliant.

The interesting thing is that he does not need to be retroactively inserted into contemporary fashion. Contemporary fashion keeps finding its way back to him.

GQ Netherlands recently revisited his wardrobe, moving from Amsterdam streetwear label Patta to Roberto Cavalli and looking back at outfits from the early 2000s alongside his more recent appearances. The point isn’t that Davids has maintained one fixed aesthetic. Quite the opposite. He has always been able to move between streetwear, tailoring, luxury and sportswear without losing the underlying character.

That is what makes the image durable; Trends change, Davids doesn’t really have a trend.

He has a vocabulary and the vocabulary is much broader than the goggles.

The goggles simply happen to be the punctuation mark. They made his face immediately legible.

Put him in a Juventus shirt and he was Davids, put him in a Netherlands shirt and he was Davids, in streetwear and he was Davids, in Cavalli and, somehow, still Davids.

That is harder than it sounds!

Most people with a strong aesthetic become trapped by it. The signature becomes costume. The thing that once distinguished you eventually becomes the thing that prevents you from changing.

Davids managed to avoid that.

The clothes evolved, the silhouette changed, the environments changed, yet the personality remained recognisable.

And there is another reason the glasses matter: they complicate the usual relationship between disability and image.

In most celebrity culture, an imperfection is something to conceal, correct or work around until it disappears from the photograph.

Davids did the opposite.

The thing that marked a vulnerability became the thing that made him visually indestructible.

There is something almost beautiful about that transformation, but it is also very practical. Davids never presented the glasses as some elaborate act of rebellion. They were functional. He needed them. He continued playing.

The fashion happened afterwards.

That distinction is important because it explains why they never looked like a costume.

He wasn’t wearing the future, he was wearing what he needed.

And because Edgar Davids was Edgar Davids, what he needed happened to look extraordinary.

Oakley had spent years making eyewear that borrowed from motocross, cycling and other forms of high-performance sport. Its original philosophy was rooted in experimentation, engineering and a refusal to make sports equipment look conventional.

Davids took that philosophy somewhere Oakley probably could not have predicted and that is why Edgar Davids is more interesting than the phrase “football style icon” allows.

His influence isn’t simply that footballers later started caring about clothes.

It is that he demonstrated how a person could become an aesthetic without becoming artificial.

His appearance wasn’t separate from his temperament. His clothes weren’t separate from his interests. His football wasn’t separate from his personality. The contradictions were the point.

The glasses were medical -> The glasses became fashionable.

The footballer became a fashion figure -> The fashion figure went back to studying.

The street player built a brand -> The aggressive midfielder became interested in surrealism, photography, design and materials.

The man who once told a stranger he was badly dressed eventually became the person whose own wardrobe would be revisited decades later as a source of inspiration.

There is a lovely absurdity to the whole thing.

A pair of goggles originally designed for athletes became one of the most recognisable objects in football while a player born in Paramaribo became one of the defining faces of Amsterdam and Turin.

A man famous for breaking up attacks became an unlikely bridge between football, street culture and fashion and a medical necessity became one of the strongest pieces of visual authorship in the history of the sport.

You can still see the original logic in the photographs. It doesn’t look like somebody trying to create an icon, it looks like somebody who had become too specific to be mistaken for anyone else.

That is probably the highest form of style.

Not being ahead of fashion or being dressed better than everyone else. Not even being particularly fashionable.

Just being so completely, stubbornly yourself that eventually the rest of the culture has to find a vocabulary for you.

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.

Subscribe now

We're hosting a free online event exclusively for GUAP community members with Shanice Mears, a British creative entrepreneur and advertising leader. She is best known as the co-founder of The Elephant Room, an independent creative company focused on culture, community and diverse creative talent.

Session Topics

- Building a community that matters: Shannie Mears shares lessons on building The Guestlist, an exclusively inclusive online network providing opportunities, industry networks, events and collaboration

- Positioning yourself for success: Over the last few years, Shannie Mears has accumulated a range of accolades, including Forbes 30 under 30 and Management Today 35 under 35. Intentional about creating her own doors and tables, learn Shannie’s top 5 tips to position yourself for success.

Curated & Hosted by OURPPLS

Date: Monday 14th September

Time: 6:30pm

To join please click the link below.

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The two trace their chemistry back to family, to growing up on opposite sides of a connection between Ghana and Jamaica that runs deeper than either of them expected, through Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line, the transatlantic slave trade, and the Maroons who carried Ghanaian roots into Jamaican soil centuries ago. Three years and nine tracks later, that history sits underneath the drums.

Watch the full conversation now.

Listen to the album here.

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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If Adéla’s ‘Ain’t In LA’ is marking a general consensus for the music industry and its listeners then it’s safe to say that the people are yearning for the underdogs to win. Fed up of the long-running chokehold that American artists’ have held over charts and pop culture, music fans have taken to social media to express their appreciation for any non-stateside stars via collages soundtracked by the unofficial song-of-the-summer. Artists like Zara Larsson, Tyla and Ayra Starr have appeared with the text “The baddest b*tches ain’t in LA, they’re from…” before adding the act’s respective country.

Considering this, Spotify’s latest campaign couldn’t have come at a better time, as it’s Hometown series sees three UK-based musicians, performing in and celebrating their beloved birthplaces. Nemzzz and Beebadoobee are two acts taking part, but it’s Walsall wonder Jorja Smith taking the reins and kickstarting the initiative gracing Walsall Arena with an intimate performance that can never be replicated.

Rapper and collaborator Wesley Joseph stepped on stage and proved that the West Midlands are quietly-producing some serious talent. The crowd were fixed on the ‘Ghostin’ songwriter’s pen game and stage presence. Joseph’s debut album Forever Ends Someday dropped back in April and it seems Jorja’s audience are familiar with a track of his or two, especially ‘July’.

Sporting a barbie-adjacent crimped ponytail, Smith walked out grinning widely to the tune of ‘Blue Lights’, the song that started it all back in 2016, delivering some impressive belts. Jorja tugged heartstrings twice in the span of five minutes instantly reciting an acapella version of ‘Teenage Fantasy’ paired with blue and purple hue lighting.

Her Afro House collaboration with Wizkid ‘Alive’ shortly follows and creates a gentle flow among the crowd. This only builds as ‘I Lied, You Lied’ plays out next and ‘For Life’ which remind fans Smith isn’t just an R&B star, she’s a musical chameleon. Previously flirting with EDM sounds via Preditah link-up ‘On My Mind’ nine years prior, now Smith is promoting her newly-released and fully-fledged Dance LP What Are The Odds.

The 29-year-old then introduced the Blue Lights Choir to the stage, a group set up by Jorja in 2022 for young girls aged 11 to 18 to sing together and have fun through music. Singing ‘Greatest Gift’, the lyrics of this track were nothing short of fitting with lyrics like “I know how hard it feels / You got me, I’m still right here” and “All you do is make me proud”. Although Smith might’ve been based in London from 18 onwards, her presence in the West Midlands is stronger than ever.

There was a moment of transparency ahead of ‘This City’ as Smith revealed the angst she’d started feeling towards London. Wishing she’d come back to Birmingham, she put pen to paper and confronted the UK capital as it “Sold a dream of a home, it’s a liе”, describing that, “This place ran it’s course, I’m tired of running”. The message of this song will always cut deep, but performing it in this 600-capacity Walsall venue made these lines cut deeper than ever.

It was then time for three back-to-back bangers, also known as the Jorja Smith holy trinity, courtesy of ‘Little Things’, ‘On My Mind’ and concert-closer ‘Be Honest’. The energy was unmatched as Smith and local fans and security couldn’t help but singalong and bust out a move to these definitive hits. This three track run was the perfect end to a personal night and kept spirits high with subtle murmurs of ‘Be Honest’ filling the corridors of Walsall Arena and Arts Centre, long after the ‘Go go go’ singer departed the auditorium.

Although tracks off her most-recent album What Are The Odds. pull from a variety of genres like Afro House, R&B, Funky House and more, Smith’s personality is its driving factor, and it’s this that has firmly established her strong relationship with fans and general music listeners. This couldn’t be more apparent when watching Smith deliver some top-notch vocals with ease before pointing out, waving to and blowing kisses at recognisable faces in the crowd.

Declaring “I’m proud to be from Walsall” while exiting the stage, this statement should hopefully instill the same pride into the crowd’s thoughts and feelings towards this West Midlands town too.

Spotify’s Hometown series continues with two more intimate performances scheduled throughout September by the likes of Nemzzz in Manchester and Beebadoobee in London.

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I didn’t start wearing braids because I wanted to follow a trend. I started wearing them after experiencing uncomfortable moments at work where I felt my Blackness was being used against me. I found myself being questioned every time I did my work, and over time, it made me question how I was being seen and how much of myself I felt safe to show.

Instead of allowing those experiences to make me hide a part of who I am, I decided to embrace the culture I am most proud of.

Being Black, for me, is strength, history and resilience. It is knowing that my power did not begin with me. It comes from the generations before me, from the people whose strength, survival and identity made it possible for me to stand proudly on my own.

That is when braids became more than a hairstyle to me. For me, braids represent who I am and what I am made of.

Every time I choose to braid my hair, I feel like I am making a statement without having to say a word. I am choosing to be visible. I am choosing to celebrate a part of myself that I will never again allow someone else to make me question.

There is something powerful about looking in the mirror and seeing yourself represented in the way you want to be seen.

For many Black women, hair carries a significance that goes far beyond beauty. It can hold memories, traditions, identity and self-expression. We change our hairstyles depending on how we feel, where we are going, what we want to express or simply because we want to see ourselves differently.

But braids carry something particularly powerful for me. They remind me that my identity has a history.

When I sit down to have my hair braided, I think about my ancestors and the strength they carried. I think about everything they had to overcome and the fact that their stories did not end with them. I am here because they were here.

My braids become a connection between who I am today and the ancestors whose strength lives within me.

There is also an artistry in braiding that deserves to be recognised. A braider is not simply doing hair. They are creating. Every section has to be precise. Every braid requires patience, skill and attention. Hours can go into creating a style that someone might see in a few seconds.

Today, braiders have become artists, entrepreneurs and creators in their own right. Through social media, their work can reach audiences far beyond their local communities, showing the creativity and skill behind a craft that has existed for generations.

The braid has become a language of its own.It can represent culture, confidence, femininity, creativity, individuality and resistance. It can tell people something about you before you have even spoken.

For me, the power of the braid is not simply in how it makes me look. It is in how it reminds me of who I am.

Someone else’s actions once made me question whether my Blackness was something I should make smaller.

I chose the opposite,I chose to make it visible and I chose to wear it proudly. Because my strength did not begin with me, and it will not end with me.

Black is power, Black is history, Black is who I am.

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It really is super cringe watching someone try too hard to fit into a city’s aesthetic.

Like for example, the person who lands in New York and immediately throws on a pair of timbs no matter the season, or the tourist in Tokyo who treats the entire city like an anime convention, leaning so heavily into a hyper-curated, pastel “kawaii” vibe that they look like a caricature of a culture they don’t actually understand.

When you dress strictly for your environment, you aren’t styling an outfit; you’re putting on a costume. You become a character playing a part based on what a Pinterest algorithm told you a specific zip code is supposed to look like. It feels forced because it is. True style isn’t about matching the scenery. It’s about staying true to yourself, regardless of where you happen to be standing.

A great example of actual authenticity would have to be Trinity on Season 8 of Love Island USA.

The villa in Fiji is an environment defined by a strict visual template, a setting designed to make everyone blend into a sun-soaked, tropical collective. But instead of succumbing to the standard island aesthetic, Trinity stepped out pairing rabbit tails with Timberland heel boots. In the middle of the South Pacific.

It was disruptive, visually striking, and authentic. At least to me. Trinity didn’t let the tropical backdrop dictate her identity or dictate what “belonged” on her feet; she brought her own aesthetic into theirs. Not to mention, she popped out in that one popular Triangl bikini from 2016. Very niche. When you dress with that level of self-trust, the environment naturally adapts to your energy, not the other way around.

Right now, we are living in the era of the algorithmic aesthetic. Digital mood boards have fundamentally changed how we view clothing. Platforms like Pinterest, TikTok, and Instagram aren’t even used for inspiration anymore. Everyone just copies and pastes. “Clean Girl,” “Mob Wife,” “Coquette.” We start dressing for the camera, for the saved folder, or to fit a neatly packaged title.

When we rely entirely on external validation to build an outfit, we stop asking ourselves what we actually like. We trade our intuitive individuality for a generic carbon copy of someone else’s feed.

Breaking free from the algorithm and regional expectations requires a conscious shift from looking outward to looking inward. It’s about building a wardrobe based on intuition rather than following what everybody else is doing. At the end of the day, fashion is meant to be an unfiltered extension of your unique perspective. You don’t need a Pinterest board to validate your choices.

You really just have to trust your instinct and show up exactly as yourself. After all, if you can wear Timbs in Fiji, you can wear anything anywhere.

We need to stop asking, “Does this fit the vibe of the place I’m going?” The only question that matters is whether the outfit actually represents you.

And no, I don’t mean wearing an Alo set to dinner either.

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.

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I think one of the biggest myths contemporary culture tells us about creativity is that originality means creating something untouched by anyone else. We are taught to imagine the artist as an isolated figure, standing apart from history, producing something entirely new from within themselves. But music has always resisted that idea. Long before sampling became a recognizable technique in modern production, people were borrowing, adapting, repeating, answering, and transforming what had come before. A rhythm would travel from one body to another. A melody would survive because somebody remembered it. A voice would become part of another voice. Music, perhaps more than almost any other form of art, has always understood that creation is rarely an act of beginning. More often, it is an act of continuation.

This is part of what makes sampling so fascinating to me. At its most powerful, sampling is not simply the act of taking something old and placing it inside something new. It is a way of changing our relationship with time. A fragment of a soul record, a drum break, a voice, a guitar line, a piece of percussion can be lifted from one historical moment and made to speak inside another. The past is not left behind. It is brought forward, altered, stretched, slowed, chopped, interrupted, repeated, and given another life. The sample becomes a kind of temporal bridge, allowing moments that were never supposed to meet to exist together. In that sense, sampling asks a strangely philosophical question: what does it mean for something to survive?

You can hear that question everywhere in Black music. The traditions that eventually fed into jazz, gospel, soul, funk, hip-hop, and countless other forms were never isolated from one another. They travelled through communities, churches, neighbourhoods, records, radio, migration, and memory. African rhythmic traditions travelled across the Atlantic through histories of forced displacement and survived conditions designed to fragment cultural continuity. Call and response, collective percussion, repetition, improvisation, and the relationship between music and social life did not disappear simply because the people carrying them were removed from the places where those traditions began. They changed shape. They found new environments. They became something else without ceasing to be connected to what came before.

That is why the history of the African diaspora can also be heard as a history of musical transformation. When people are displaced, memory does not always survive in complete form. Sometimes it survives in fragments. A rhythm. A phrase. A movement. A way of responding to another voice. A feeling that cannot easily be explained but can still be reproduced. Music became one of the places where those fragments could remain alive. It carried histories that could not always be written down, preserving forms of knowledge through sound, repetition, and collective participation. Sound carried civilization.

Sampling enters this history almost naturally. Hip-hop’s emergence was not a rejection of the past but a conversation with it. Producers searched through records and discovered sounds that could be rearranged into something that belonged to their own moment. The turntable, sampler, and drum machine became tools for excavation. What had once existed as a complete song could be broken apart and reorganized. A drummer from another generation could suddenly become part of a new beat. A singer who had been recorded decades earlier could appear to speak to an entirely different generation. The distance between past and present became strangely thin.

Few artists embodied this excavation more profoundly than J Dilla. On Donuts, his sampling feels less like quotation than archaeology. In “Time: The Donut of the Heart”, he takes the Jackson 5’s “All I Do Is Think of You” and turns its warmth into something hazier, as though the memory of the original were being heard through another room. In “Don’t Cry”, a fragment of The Escorts’ “I Can’t Stand (To See You Cry)” is chopped and rearranged until the source becomes inseparable from Dilla’s own emotional world. On “Lightworks”, he reaches even further outward, taking Raymond Scott’s strange electronic composition and making it speak through hip-hop. The records remain inside the beats, but they no longer exist exactly as they did before. Dilla does not simply preserve them. He changes the conditions under which they can be remembered. His genius was not only in finding the fragment, but in understanding that a fragment could contain an entire emotional history.

There is something deeply human about taking a fragment of the past and refusing to let it remain where you found it. We do this with photographs, stories, family sayings, clothing, recipes, gestures, and language. We inherit things and then change them, sometimes consciously, sometimes without realizing it. The diaspora has always lived inside this tension between inheritance and transformation. What survives is rarely untouched. It arrives altered by distance, trauma, geography, time, and the people who carry it. Perhaps that is why sampling feels so culturally significant. It does not pretend that inheritance means preservation without change. Instead, it acknowledges that survival often requires transformation.

The idea becomes even more interesting when we look at how African and diasporic sounds continue to travel today. Rhythms move between continents with extraordinary speed. Hip-hop travelled across the world and became local without ceasing to be global. House music found new forms in South Africa. Amapiano emerged from South African townships and travelled far beyond them. Afrobeats absorbed influences from across Africa and the diaspora while becoming one of the most globally recognizable contemporary sounds. We hear this vividly in London clubs and the UK underground, where diaspora youth collapse geographic distance by blending these sounds into the local soundscape. None of these movements represent a simple transfer from one place to another. They are acts of reinterpretation. Sound arrives somewhere new and is changed by the people who receive it.

This is perhaps where the mythology of the isolated artist begins to fall apart. Creativity is often presented as individual genius, as though the artist produces something entirely alone, and originality can be measured by how far they stand from everyone else. But music tells a different story. A beat contains other beats. A voice carries other voices. A genre contains histories. A song can contain an entire geography of influence. The artist is not necessarily the beginning of the chain. They are one point within it.

Sampling makes that visible. It reveals the layers beneath the finished work and forces us to acknowledge that culture is built through accumulation. One generation leaves something behind. Another generation finds it, changes it, and leaves something else behind. The process continues. This does not diminish creativity. If anything, it makes creativity more extraordinary. To inherit something and make it speak differently is its own form of invention.

There is also something politically significant about this kind of remembering. For communities whose histories have been interrupted, erased, distorted or displaced, recovering fragments can become an act of refusal. The sample says that something existed before the present moment. It insists that the past is not dead simply because its original context has disappeared. It allows forgotten sounds to re-enter public life. In that sense, sampling can be understood as a radical form of Black memory, a refusal to accept disappearance as the final outcome of history.

Perhaps this is why music can feel so strangely personal even when we cannot explain why. A rhythm can move through the body before the mind understands it. A voice can create recognition without explanation. Something in us responds to patterns that may have existed long before we arrived. This is not necessarily about genetic memory or some mystical inheritance. It is about cultural memory, the accumulated presence of sounds, gestures, stories, and forms that have travelled through generations and environments. We inherit more than we know we inherit.

And perhaps that is the deeper meaning of sampling. It is a philosophy of inheritance disguised as a production technique. It asks us to reconsider what it means to create, to remember, and to belong. The sample is never exactly what it was, but neither is it entirely new. It exists between identities, between moments, between places. It carries the trace of another time while becoming part of the present. Diaspora becomes audible.

When I listen to music built this way, I do not only hear production. I hear a conversation. I hear people who lived before us speaking through people who are alive now. I hear the distance between continents becoming smaller for a moment. I hear fragments finding each other again. And perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things music can do. It can remind us that history is not only something written in books or preserved in monuments. Sometimes it survives in a beat, in a melody, in the texture of a voice, waiting for somebody else to recognise it and carry it forward.

The past does not always return in the form we expect. Sometimes it arrives distorted, fragmented, slowed down, repeated, or buried inside something that sounds entirely new. But if we listen closely enough, we can hear something older insisting softly through the machinery of the present, not simply that the past belongs to us, but that we belong to something that came before us, and that what survives through us may yet become somebody else’s inheritance.

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.

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There are footballers who define eras through trophies. There are footballers who define them through statistics. Then there is Mario Balotelli.

Who somehow managed to define an era without ever fully belonging to it.

The conversation around Balotelli has always been strangely incomplete. It oscillates between two lazy extremes: wasted talent or misunderstood genius. The first turns him into a cautionary tale. The second into a romantic martyr. Both flatten a figure who was always operating on several frequencies at once.

Balotelli wasn’t simply a striker, he was one of the first footballers to understand, perhaps instinctively rather than strategically, that modern football wasn’t only about performance anymore. It was becoming culture. Identity. Fashion.

Long before footballers became luxury ambassadors, podcast guests, magazine covers, and front row fixtures at Paris Fashion Week, Mario Balotelli was accidentally inventing that language.

The problem was simple: nobody knew how to read him.

Football Before Image

To understand Balotelli, you have to remember what football looked like around 2010.

Cristiano Ronaldo represented perfection, Lionel Messi represented humility, Wayne Rooney represented grit, Steven Gerrard represented loyalty.

Football identities were carefully packaged archetypes.

Even the rebellious players. the Zlatans, the Cassanos, the Gattusos, still belonged to recognizable traditions. Their masculinity was legible. Their rebellion had familiar rules, but Balotelli refused every script.

One week he would score one of the most technically perfect goals imaginable. The next week he’d collect a ridiculous red card. The following week he’d buy a Vespa because he felt like it. Then he’d give thousands of euros to strangers. Then he’d set fireworks off in his bathroom. Then he’d casually arrive at training in camouflage trousers, oversized headphones and a confidence that belonged more to a rap artist than an Italian striker.

The media interpreted inconsistency. Culture was witnessing the birth of something new.

Dressing Like Nobody Else

Football has always had style.

George Best had it. The Milan players of the late eighties had it.

David Beckham professionalized it, but Beckham’s fashion was aspirational, beautiful, polished and commercial.

Balotelli’s wasn’t. It was chaotic. Sometimes terrible, sometimes incredible, but always unmistakably his.

Designer belts with tracksuits, camouflage, leather, snapbacks, diamond earrings, sleeve tattoos, mohawks that became recognizable silhouettes.

Nothing was minimal and nothing apologized.

Years before football fully embraced streetwear, Balotelli already looked like somebody who spent equal amounts of time between football training, Milan clubs, and backstage at a fashion show.

Today, none of this feels radical.

Jules Koundé arrives dressed like an avant-garde stylist, Héctor Bellerín speaks the language of fashion editors, Memphis Depay moves seamlessly between football and music, Paul Pogba turned hairstyles into weekly headlines, but Balotelli existed before football had developed a vocabulary for players who wanted to build identities beyond ninety minutes.

He wasn’t dressing for magazines, he was simply dressing like Mario, and Ironically, authenticity has become luxury.

Before Football Became Luxury Culture

The explosion of football’s relationship with fashion is often attributed to the late 2010s.

The arrival of Virgil Abloh and the rise of Off-White.

Luxury collaborations, players attending runway shows. Jacquemus inviting footballers. Louis Vuitton campaigns. Football becoming culturally adjacent to hip-hop, but Balotelli had already crossed those borders years earlier.

Not through calculated branding, but through pure instinct. He understood something that football institutions didn’t: footballers no longer lived exclusively inside stadiums, they lived inside culture.

Their hairstyles mattered, their Instagram mattered, their music mattered, their clothes mattered. The tunnel was becoming a runway before anyone started calling it one.

“Why Always Me?”

Perhaps no football image summarizes internet culture better than Balotelli lifting his shirt after scoring against Manchester United.

Underneath:

WHY ALWAYS ME?

The phrase became a meme, a joke, a headline.

But it also became one of football’s earliest examples of personal branding without branding.

Today players launch documentaries explaining themselves, they post Notes App statements, they curate emotional vulnerability.

Balotelli condensed an entire relationship with media into three words and it worked because ambiguity travels further than certainty.

Nobody knew exactly what he meant. Everyone projected something onto it.

That’s internet culture before social media fully matured.

Blackness Inside Italian Football

It would also be intellectually dishonest to discuss Balotelli without discussing race.

Not because race explains every headline surrounding him, but because pretending it played no role would ignore the reality of Italian football.

Born in Palermo to Ghanaian parents and adopted by an Italian family, Balotelli spent much of his career being treated as simultaneously too Italian and not Italian enough.

Monkey chants followed him across stadiums, bananas were thrown onto pitches.

Commentators repeatedly described him through language rarely applied to white players exhibiting similar behavior.

He became emotional, explosive, “difficult”, temperamental. Football has always romanticized rebellious white genius.

Eric Cantona became philosophy, Paul Gascoigne became tragedy. George Best became mythology, Balotelli was too often reduced to spectacle.

The double standard never entirely disappeared.

The Internet Loved Him Before Football Did

Perhaps Balotelli’s greatest cultural achievement happened accidentally. He became infinitely remixable through GIFs, memes, reaction images, Tumblr edits and Twitter jokes. TikTok compilations years later.

His facial expressions became language, his unpredictability became content before “content” became a profession.

Football has produced countless legends, but very few became internet folklore.

Balotelli did. Not because he tried, because unpredictability survives algorithms, consistency doesn’t.

The Fashion of Contradiction

Fashion has always loved contradiction.

Luxury mixed with sportswear, tailoring with trainers, vintage beside futurism etc.

Balotelli embodied contradiction before it became aesthetic currency.

He looked intimidating then donated money to homeless people. He appeared arrogant then displayed remarkable generosity. He behaved recklessly then spoke with surprising emotional intelligence.

He projected hardness, yet seemed unusually sensitive to criticism.

Like many cultural icons, he resisted coherent narratives. The fashion world celebrates people who cannot be easily categorized, but football rarely does.

The Prototype We Didn’t Recognize

Looking backwards, Balotelli appears less like an exception and more like a prototype.

Today’s footballer isn’t simply an athlete. He’s simultaneously:

A luxury consumer, a media company, a fashion client, a creative collaborator, a music enthusiast, an internet personality, a walking archive of visual references.

Balotelli lived that reality before institutions had adapted to it.

He wasn’t ahead tactically, he was ahead culturally!

History tends to confuse those two things.

Beyond Potential

Every Balotelli conversation eventually arrives at the same destination.

“What if?” What if he’d been more disciplined? What if Mourinho had handled him differently? What if Manchester City had kept him longer? What if Milan had worked out? These are football questions. Culture asks different ones.

What remains after the goals are forgotten? Why does his image still circulate? Why do fashion moodboards still feature him? Why do young creatives born after his peak still reference him? Because cultural influence obeys different mathematics than sporting achievement.

Some players collect trophies, others collect lore.

Balotelli accumulated something stranger: he became a symbol of transition between football and fashion, athlete and celebrity, stadium and internet, performance and identity.

Perhaps Mario Balotelli wasn’t football’s greatest unfulfilled talent.

Perhaps he was football’s first postmodern footballer, a player who instinctively understood that, in the twenty first century, ninety minutes would never again be enough to explain who an athlete could become.

That may not have won him the Ballon d’Or, but it quietly changed the culture surrounding the game.

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.

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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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There was a time when making music mostly meant, well… making music.

Writing songs. Finding your sound. Performing. Experimenting. Creating something that felt unmistakably like you.

Today, making the song is only half the job.

Before your creativity reaches an audience, there’s another question to answer: how do you make the algorithm care?

For emerging artists - particularly with one-person teams - that may look like transforming into a content strategist, personal brand, social media manager and marketer alongside being a musician. The song needs a solid hook, but increasingly, so does the content selling it.

As both a musician and digital marketer, I’ve become increasingly aware of this tension as music creation and discovery have evolved. Great music still needs visibility, and good marketing connects the right artist with the right audience.

But there’s a fine line between marketing music for discovery and creating music for discoverability.

When Musicians Become Marketers

Artists are now expected to understand short-form video, branding, audience retention, content strategy and the unwritten rules of whichever platform they’re hoping will introduce their music to new listeners.

The result is a strange reversal. Instead of platforms simply helping audiences discover great music, musicians can find themselves creating around what platforms are most likely to reward.

A brilliant record can exist with 2,000 streams while another reaches millions because eight seconds became the soundtrack to a trend. That doesn’t necessarily make one better. It makes one more algorithmically visible.

In marketing terms, visibility can easily be mistaken for preference. What performs well gets distributed further, which shapes what audiences encounter.

We’re no longer just asking, “What are people listening to?” We’re also asking, “What content are people engaging with?”

Those questions can produce very different answers.

Some Music Was Never Designed for Eight Seconds

That becomes particularly interesting with genres such as R&B, soul and jazz.

These genres are built heavily upon storytelling, musicianship and feeling. Sometimes the best moment isn’t the opening hook.

It’s the chord progression underneath the second verse. The background vocal you notice on your fourth listen. The instrumental break. The ridiculous run tucked somewhere near the end.

Historically, music discovery has also been deeply human. DJs, record shops, local venues, radio presenters, friends and music communities introduced audiences to artists outside the mainstream.

Algorithms haven’t eliminated that behaviour, but they’ve changed who holds the keys.

Discovery Is a Two-Way Street

It’s easy to say we should “support independent artists”, but doing it requires intention.

Listening beyond the viral snippet matters. Saving a song matters. Sharing it matters. Buying tickets to a small show matters. Following an artist with 4,000 streams rather than waiting until everybody else decides they’re worth paying attention to matters.

Today’s “small artist” could simply be an artist the algorithm hasn’t introduced to enough people yet.

There are incredible artists creating R&B, soul, jazz and everything between them right now. The question isn’t whether the talent exists.

It’s whether we’re still willing to go looking for it.

Culture has always moved forward because somebody took a chance on something they hadn’t heard before.

R&B, Soul and Jazz Taught Me Something Different

My own musical influences sit heavily within R&B, soul and jazz, where some of my favourite moments aren’t necessarily the ones you’d expect to go “viral”.

Ella Fitzgerald has been one of my biggest musical influences. Her voice wasn’t simply about delivering a catchy melody. It was an instrument in itself. Through phrasing, improvisation and scat singing, she could take an existing standard and make it unmistakably her own.

As for R&B, let’s take the vocal layering and musicianship throughout D’Angelo’s Voodoo album for example, where part of the magic is sitting within the groove rather than waiting for one standout moment. Many moments we remember mostly happen around the obvious hook. The vocal run towards the end of the song. The subtle chord change underneath a lyric. The background harmony you only notice after listening with headphones.

And Jazz takes that even further, with records like Miles Davis’ “So What”, intentionally leaving space for improvisation, conversation between musicians and ideas that develop over several minutes. You’re not necessarily supposed to understand everything within the opening few seconds.

These approaches to music have always fascinated me.

And they’ve consistently taught me to always appreciate musicianship, storytelling and, most importantly, feeling.

Jazz doesn’t always offer instant gratification. Sometimes you have to sit with it. Soul asks you to feel something. R&B has continually reinvented itself while carrying pieces of everything that came before it.

That feels increasingly at odds with an industry where artists are encouraged to capture attention within seconds. But maybe music shouldn’t have to.

As I continue navigating as an artist, this balance has become an increasingly important part of my musical journey and something that (hopefully) acts as a core reminder for my fellow underground creatives too.

Discovery Isn’t the Problem

Algorithms aren’t inherently the enemy. I’ve discovered incredible artists through TikTok, Instagram and YouTube who I probably wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

For independent musicians, that’s huge.

The problem comes when discovery starts dictating an artist’s creative process. When the first question becomes “Will this perform?” instead of “Do I actually like this?” or “Does this genuinely reflect something I want to say?”

Creativity gets boring very quickly when everybody responds to the same signals, especially when creating for virality takes priority over raw, authentic emotion.

Final Thoughts

The algorithm isn’t killing music. But it is changing how we discover, market and sometimes even create it.

As a marketer, I’ve developed an appreciation for this. The visibility, audience and strategy all matter. After all, great music still needs to reach people.

But as an artist, I believe there also has to be a line.

Marketing should help incredible art find its audience. But it shouldn’t determine what the art has to become in order to deserve one.

So to the wider music industry and music lovers, go beyond the viral snippet. Explore those unsigned artists with <2,000 streams. Share the song nobody on your timeline is talking about yet.

Algorithms are exceptionally good at giving us more of what we already like.

Artists are there to give us something we didn’t know we wanted yet.

Author Notes

Shantelle King is a UK-based R&B singer-songwriter and award-nominated digital marketer, discovered by the likes of BBC Radio and 1xtra. With a passion for R&B, soul and jazz, exploring the intersection between music, creativity, culture and marketing.

Connect with Shantelle:

Artist, Shantelle King Official (Instagram)

Music, Shantelle King (Spotify)

Marketing, Shantelle King (LinkedIn)

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I’ve been thinking about this recently, particularly in relation to how we show up in our own lives, both as contributors to and consumers of culture and the arts. We are constantly encouraged to put ourselves out there, to be visible, available and open to every opportunity that comes our way.

Showing up has become synonymous with being present for everything: every conversation, and invitation. But showing up for everything isn’t necessarily the same thing as showing up for yourself.

Sometimes, showing up for yourself means becoming more intentional about where your efforts go. It means recognising the difference between being open to life and making yourself available to everything within it. We can spend so much time holding doors open because we’re afraid of missing an opportunity that we forget to ask whether we actually want to walk through them.

The past eight months have shown me that being unavailable isn’t about slipping off the radar. It’s about discernment. It’s about understanding what consistently takes from you and deciding that you no longer have to make space for it. This is an essential first step.

And before the imposter syndrome takes over, let me clarify:

Expression and Achievement Are Different Things

Another thing I have been thinking about is the difference between expression and achievement. The two are not the same, although we often treat them as if they are. Not everything that has given me purpose has had to be produced into something the world can measure, and I think that is an important thing to remember in a world where we are constantly being asked what we have to show for ourselves.

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