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DO I SPEAK FOR THE WORLD
(Atlantic)
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After a short string of albums in which Gerald Levert made the most of his first name’s first initial, the soul playa now returns to the traditional bleeding-heart sound and attitude that his daddy, Eddie, parlayed into a black entertainment empire with the O’Jays in the 1970s. And just as poppa would, Gerald goes deep with attitude and short on analysis in the genuinely weird title-track opener. You’d think the question might be directed toward another first-initial-G man who’s inherited daddy’s little empire, but instead, Levert seems to be asking whether he must bear the world’s cross himself, a delusion reinforced by the string of messianic aphorisms that follow the cut from talk-show phenom Tavis Smiley and left academic hipster Cornel West. Fortunately, Gerald soon enough leaves being greater for later as he focuses on teaching a succession of ladies how to love, pleading and promising with such deliciously syrupy bombast — the aural equivalent of a thousand silk handkerchiefs being wrung of tears — that it’s hard not join him in clinking a glass to the past as he sums up his true global outlook at the album’s end: "When all is lost/Family is there."
