They introduced Octavia of Earth with a live workshop production that premiered in San Francisco in 2018. Carlis Roberts immersed themselves in Butler’s journals and interviewed her friends, family and colleagues to make a musical documentary inspired by her life. The EP is the second contribution to an ongoing project spearheaded by Anand Kalra, the executive director of the Queer Cultural Center in San Francisco. Octavia of Earth opens with “Pasadena Goddam,” a nod to Nina Simone’s famous civil rights era cri de coeur about Mississippi. “She had to carve out a path, and we interpret and envision her life based on what we know.”įeaturing three of the Bay Area’s most prominent Black women rockers and the versatile powerhouse Cash (aka Katie Colpitts), Skip the Needle has earned widespread attention with a repertoire of driving, elemental songs keyed to themes of social justice and resistance. “The music is about her,” said Oakland drummer/vocalist Kofy Brown, who co-founded the all-star Skip the Needle with Berkeley bassist/vocalist Vicki Randle, Berkeley guitarist/vocalist Shelley Doty and Oakland guitarist/vocalist Katie Cash.
Two, a project that explores her experience growing up and thriving creatively in Pasadena despite the long odds against a Black woman writing in the oft-disrespected sci-fi genre. The quartet plays the Ivy Room Saturday to celebrate the release of a new six-track Little Village Foundation EP Octavia of the Earth Vol. Last May, Cal Performances presented Toshi Reagon’s Butler-inspired folk opera Parable of the Sower, but a new work by East Bay rock band Skip the Needle looks past her writing to delve into Butler’s extraordinary life and mind. Talents is set amidst a presidential campaign by a demagogue claiming he’ll “make America great again,” though he also poses as a patriarchal paragon of virtue, so even the matriarch of Afrofuturism couldn’t foresee the funhouse-mirror distortions of recent national elections.
Presented in the form of a journal kept by a Black teenager named Lauren Olamina, the first novel opens with an entry dated July 20, 2024, and goes on to describe California as a chaotic landscape where the weather is more unstable and extreme due to global warming and law and order has broken down as new drugs drive people to commit wanton acts of destruction. Butler’s 1993 dystopian masterpiece Parable of the Sower recently or her 1998 sequel Parable of the Talents, there’s no better time to take a bracing glimpse at tomorrow’s headlines.
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