Eartha Kitt, a lothario of soul music as well as an enthusiastic thinker, looks to the sky in the garden, pink plants beyond her blooming on a tree. "Are you ready to compromise in a relationship?" A voice offscreen asks her. She wrinkles her face repeating the word – it's foreign. "What is compromising – compromising for what?" Her eyes are trained on the voice saying this word. She doesn't let up. "To compromise, for what? What is compromise?" The man reiterates the question and her upset spell is damaged. Her head cocks to the heavens and she roars with laughter. She finally gets it. The question is a joke.
No one can reconstruct Kitt's prickly voice that sent cold shivers down the neck, yet
Jamila Woods damn sure knows how to capture the absurdity of the aforementioned scene from the 1982 documentary
All By Myself: An Eartha Kitt Story. Woods' new single "Eartha" is smoother than an egg and brings back that neo-soul nostalgia of the early 2000s. Although it's not a slow groove — it's mid-tempo funk with a creamy chorus and supporting vocals, where Woods equally asserts that compromising in a relationship is bullshit. Woods says more with one stretched out sigh of a word than most singers do with entire verses. Kitt can rest well knowing that someone picked up where she left off. —
Trey Alston