Making a hip-hop concept record in which the unifying referents are the Beatles and Common's "I Used to Love H.E.R." sounds like a recipe for stodgy, safe-as-milk canonical hell, and those aren't the only strikes against South Carolina rapper-producer and recent Def Jux signee Daniel Swain. The young man who performs as Danny! has already spent much of his brief career simultaneously cleaving towards and sternly rebuffing a musical and image-based resemblance to Kanye West, who, by the way, himself recently released a song that borrowed Common's gimmick of describing a relationship with an impersonal thing (in West's case, Chicago) through the metaphor of a romantic dalliance-- a song, no less, that Swain actually freaking quotes on his new album, And I Love H.E.R.
For the record, Swain is far better described as a less-righteous Lupe Fiasco than any kind of Kanye clone, and surprisingly And I Love H.E.R. is an engaging, thoroughly promising album regardless of its dubious origins. Yes, a great many of these songs can be heard as veiled presentations of Swain's complex feelings towards hip-hop, but for the most part you can also take them on their face and still be no less rewarded (and quite possibly more enriched). A thousand words could be spent on pondering why some of rap's most honest and affecting odes directed at a feminine Other have actually been personifications not at all concerned with flesh-and-blood women, but Swain may be able to have it both ways here. If you read the successive tracks "I Want H.E.R. (She's So Heavy)" and "At What Price" as genuine meditations on the rosy and sour sides of love, they're truly satisfying, avoiding assholishness, and perhaps more importantly, avoiding self-congratulation for avoiding assholishness. Temporarily letting down even the pretense of his conceptual guard, Swain hones in on the source of much of his generation's gendered antipathy, dedicating "Do You" to portraying how the roots of misogyny are planted in unstable homes.
Swain seems eminently capable of empathy, but most of his time is spent chewing on deeply personal concerns, with the result being that the record can feel a bit hermetic at times. Lucky for him, then, that his personality is sufficiently engaging and his music sufficiently buoyant that we don't mind following him down his private rabbit holes, especially not when he flashes such consistent cleverness, boasting that "No one's effin' with me on this Guitar Hero shit," taking a jab at Tyler Perry's Madea plays, and dropping references to Flickr, Theo Huxtable, and Colin Quinn. While Swain's grappling with the pressures and pitfalls of hip-hop may occasionally grow tendentious, he doesn't allow grouchiness or self-excoriation to seep into his music either. In fact, the beats on And I Love H.E.R. offer a fascinating counterpoint to his navel-gazing, being almost uniformly generous, breezy, and life-affirming. Of course, were the lush strings of "Intro" or warm horns of "Guess Who's Back" paired with equally insouciant lyrics, the effect might trend towards the too-relaxed province of a thousand blithe Golden Age revivalists, so it's a blessing that Swain does almost always remember to undercut his symphonic settings with serious ruminations or sardonic wit, skewering the sunny "Hey Ya" lilt of "The Groove" with a mid-song mocking interpolation of "Crank That (Soulja Boy)".
Still, the shopworn agonizing over hip-hop's strictures and shortcomings you can read in "Where You Goin'" and "After the Love Has Gone" do represent a sore worried too insistently. The brightest hope for Swain's future lies in him finding a way to channel his internal wrestling into the stuff of wider resonance, which is exactly what makes the drum-laden "Wanderland" the album's most compelling moment. Swain offers vignettes of a 37 year-old, eternally aspiring emcee tired of "seeing the same 112 fans on MySpace" and an archetypal starry-eyed girl who goes to California to pursue singing dreams but ends up duped and "on the pole." But these characters aren't just cautionary tales to Swain, they're kindred spirits, and recounting their struggles pushes him to ponder, "I fear I'm headed down the same path sometimes/ Worried if my dreams of hittin' big are asinine."
