Our guest editor Papz helped us find the people deciding what British culture laughs at, argues about and looks like next. The issue is free to download.
Every few years, the people shaping culture change their address. It used to be the newspaper, then the music channel, then the radio. Today it’s a phone propped against a mug on someone’s bedroom desk, and the person behind it often has a bigger audience than the outlets that once ignored them. The fifth issue of The Detail is about those people.
The Detail is Common Sense’s digital magazine. Each issue takes one theme and hands the editor’s chair to someone who lives inside it. For Content Creators Shaping Culture, that person was Papz. Whenever something happens online, people go looking for the Papz skit. He writes every one himself, posted for years before any of it paid, and describes himself, without much modesty, as the best in the country at what he does. We wanted someone who understood the craft and the culture in equal measure, and who knew which names deserved attention before everyone else caught on.
We sat down with him at the studio to talk about satire, Nigerian stand-up and knowing where the line is. We also asked him to pick the creators readers should be watching. His answer became the issue’s centrepiece: 30 must-watch creators across comedy, lifestyle, sport, music, fashion and faith. Some have millions of followers and some have a few thousand, but each makes something that’s unmistakably theirs.
Around that list sit the stories. Zayz explains how a clothing brand nobody would help him promote turned him into one of the more recognisable faces from his estate. Aziza Zawadi and Jordan Kuponiyi come to locs from opposite directions, one raised in a Rastafarian home and one growing his against his family’s wishes at 22, and both are changing how their audiences see Black hair. Tomi Okeowo looks at why Black creators are still paid less than white creators with identical audiences, and why the pattern is older than the internet. There’s also a letter from our founder to his younger self, written ten years after buying a camera he couldn’t really afford.
We make The Detail because culture is usually documented after the fact, by people who weren’t in the room. This issue is our attempt to write it down while it’s still happening, with the people doing the work telling it in their own words.
Download Issue 005 for free below. Enter your email and we’ll send it straight to your inbox, along with Sense Check, our Friday round-up of the week’s best work from across the network.
Mike Omoniyi
Mike Omoniyi is the Founder and Editor In Chief of The Common Sense Network. He oversees and is responsible for the direction of the Network. Mike is an activist, singer/songwriter and keen athlete. With a degree in Politics Philosophy and Economics, MA in Political Science (Democracy and Elections) and an incoming PhD on a study of Cyber-Balkanisation, Mike is passionate about politics and the study of argumentation. He is also the Managing Director of a number of organisations including, Our God Given Mission, The BAM Project and The Apex Group.
