#3 070 Shake: Petrichor

20th May 1983, a car bomb in the the South African capital of Pretoria went off. The target was the South African Air Force (SAAF), who were renting a building on Church Street West, where the bomb went off. The bomb killed eleven SAAF personnel, plus the two people who planted the bomb (unintentionally) and six civilians. Two hundred and seventeen people were injured in the attack.

The bomb had been planted by uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), a political group founded by Nelson Mandela in order to force the end of the racist policies of the South African government. The attack was a response to a cross border raid by the South African army into Lesotho in December 1982, which killed 42 ANC members.

Mohammed Eyad Maher Abu-Leila

#6 Godspeed You! Black Emperor: “NO TITLE AS OF 21 DECEMBER 2024 45,206 DEAD”

Or ‘”NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD“‘ if you want the original title. I was just trying to update it a bit to help them out.

When GY!BE finally settled on that title in February (“NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?“), the Israeli authorities had been causing massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza for around four months. Perhaps, knowing that the record would be released in October, GY!BE assumed that the massacre would have surely been brought to a halt by international operations by that point. Perhaps GY!BE named the album that way to ensure a moment in time, a gross period of humanity, was forever notified in the most matter of fact way possible. At their most cynical, the band might have thought that by the time of the album’s October release – close to to the one year anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel that set off the bloodshed in response – the international community were doing their best to sweep this tiny little genocidal snafu from everybody’s memories and attempting to rebuild Netanyahu’s image as a cuddly friend to imperialism and the West. They might not have dared to think that the slaughter was still continuing.

Jannat Naji Abd Al-Rahman Abu-Hammad