Attention Deficit, the long-awaited Wale record, is finally out on Tuesday. This track, “O.G.,” isn’t on it. It’s a Sean C. & LV production, built around a wonderful and wonderfully-appropriate soul guitar lick, with Travis Barker providing live and nimble-fingered drums. I’ve often been frustrated as a drummer with the lack of creative drumming in hip-hop — a controversial statement, I know, but as good as, say, ?uestlove is (and I can tell you as a student of drumming he’s excellent), the format doesn’t easily allow him to freak out.* One of the things I love about Wale’s synthesis of go-go and mainstream hiphop is the freedom that allows the drum tracks.

*This is not to say ?uest’s patterns themselves aren’t creative. It’s to make the general point that as important as drumming is in hip-hop, no one’s yet found a way to optimize their power as an instrument in the way, say, that eerie and ever-weirder strings and piano loops dominated mid-90s production. Maybe I’m not expressing this well. But when you read producers’ magazines like Scratch, the discussion is most energetic when centering around creative drum sounds — who has the best snare sounds or optimum compression on the kick drum — and not creative patterns. Vocals are always going to be the dominant hip-hop instrument. No one disputes that. But the most creative drum patterns in hip-hop recently are probably the “A Milli” beat, precisely because there’s nothing on the track except vocals and a non-traditional drum arrangement.