Eartha Kitt - Purr-fect Greatest Hits (@256)

Orson Welles dubbed her "The most exciting woman in the world." Critic Brooks Atkinson wrote: "Eartha Kitt not only looks incendiary, but she can make a song burst into flame." Just compare Eartha Kitt with what most contemporary female pop artists represent and you will realise how much adventurous, risky and ultimately sexy she was, and how rule followers, label-manipulated and ultimately fake the latter are. Eartha, when label executives tried to encourage her to fol­low more standard pop formulas, made it perfectly clear that, "I don't want to be an artist who has to live on his latest record. This does not prove that I'm an artist, only that I am being adver­tised, like Coca-Cola. What happens to me when I don't have a hit? I explained that I must be the artist I thought I was capable of being. If I happened to have a hit record in this process, so much the better." Like many of her contempo­raries, Eartha's recording career was stymied by the advent of rock and roll, and it certainly didn't help matters that Kitt and Elvis were both in RCA, with Elvis receiving all promotional attention. She remained though a constant pres­ence in films, the theatre, and on television, where she gained an entirely new following for her campy portray­al of the Cat Woman on the Batman series. In 1968, during a luncheon at the White House, she had the guts to criticise the US involvement in Vietnam and its impact on poor minorities. Unfortunately, the consequence was a dramatic career downfall since she was blacklisted and could not book throughout her country. RIP

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