Fatlip. Most hip-hop beats featured very predictable drum patterns, in part because they were looped, but also because they hewed to a standard time grid. But in “Runnin’,” Jay Dee had flouted both these conventions. He’d programmed the kick drum not in a standard two- or four-bar loop, but in a long sequence that didn’t repeat until the twentieth bar, in linear fashion, so that it did different things in every new measure of music, as a human drummer would do.
