Throwback: Cree Summer-Miss Moon

[youtube id=”B7vceif8rn8″]Cree Summer’s Street Faërie was her first album as a solo artist and a departure from her work as a television and voice actress. She had recorded the album Womb Amnesia with her band Subject to Change but Capitol Records did not release it because of creative differences. “Miss Moon” was not the typical topic for a rock song with lyrics about a woman’s body being affected by lunar cycles and what it was like for her to make love at that time. Summer and Kravitz wrote “Miss Moon” and it was one of the more popular songs from Street Faërie. Summer’s bohemian rock was unsettling for 1999 because of her pro-woman stance on women’s bodies in “Miss Moon” and her shameless criticism of white men who fetishize Black women in some interracial relationships as addressed on the song “Curious White Boy.” Van Hunt co-wrote three of the songs on Street Faërie including “Mean Sleep.”

Summer toured Street Faërie as the opening act for Kravitz but the Sony subsidiary the Work Group did not know how to market Summer’s music and dropped her from the label. The album is now a rare find among music fans especially those who have followed her since the days of playing Freddie Brooks on A Different World. She was musically active last in 2008 when she acknowledged her Frank Zappa influence by appearing on The Frank Zappa AAAFNRAAA Birthday Bundle by performing a cover of “Dirty Love” with Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa. Today Cree Summer is a legend in the voice acting realm for the dozens of television shows, video games and films she has verbalized over the past 35 years.