Toddy Tee – The Batterram Tape (Mixtape, 1985) [Stream / DL]

File under precious hip hop history languishing in Youtube obscurity – here’s Toddy Tee’s long unavailable underground classic, The Batterram Tape.

If you know anything about the history of LA rap – or about the historic awfulness of the LAPD – you probably have heard of the Compton rapper’s debut single “Batterram,” a story rap about the very real Vietnam-used V-100 tanks that the LAPD would retrofit with a ten foot battering ram and use to knock down the barricaded doors of presumed crack houses. Often they would take down adjacent walls or entire residential houses in the process, as fictionalized in the opening scene of the Straight Outta Compton movie. It was perhaps the most hideously literal interpretation of the “war on drugs” premise and one of the earliest steps towards the across-the-board militarization of the American policing that has now become the norm. “Batterram” was the street soundtrack to this madness and is usually acknowledged as the very first gangsta rap record.

And yet the widely heard mix of the track, as released in 1985 on Leon Haywood’s Evejim imprint, now feels tame in light of both its real life subject matter and the decades of reality rap it helped to inspire. There’s a reason for this – the single version is actually the second version of the song, rewritten and recorded at the behest of KDAY DJ Greg Mack. The original, which had been circulating that summer via Toddy’s swap meet mixtape and dubs thereof, was too lo-fi and vulgar for radio play. Officially untitled, but colloquially known as The Batterram Tape, that mix was recorded as part of a series of back-and-forth bedroom tapes recorded in a friendly rivalry with fellow Compton DJ Mixmaster Spade. Toddy, Spade and their other friend Mixmaster Ken, who appears on two tracks here, are sort of the Bellville Three of Compton rap, except only infrequently acknowledged as such. In part this is because their earliest undergrounds are so difficult to find and their later [1] recordings, while classics in their own time, now sound a bit dull in the wake of NWA.

But this tape, which to my knowledge had never circulated on the internet prior to Youtube user “Old Schol Raps” quietly uploading it three years ago, is everything it’s supposed to be. It sounds dated in its own way, to be certain, but so much rawer than those later Toddy tracks in both sound and content. The original “Batterram” is set to the “Rappin’ Duke” instrumental [2] which of course slaps harder than Haywood’s sideways half interpolation. On it Toddy cusses up a storm and repeatedly calls out LA’s then-mayor Tom Bradley and LAPD Chief Darryl Gates out by name. And crucially, this version is told entirely from the perspective of the unjustly batter-rammed homeowner, where most of the retail version is framed as a cautionary third person tale.

Toddy explores a more distinctly complicit street persona throughout the rest of the tape, dodging cluckheads (crackheads) and police raids in equal measure. There’s a parodic approach to almost every on track here, sort of a d-boy Weird Al thing [5] – LL’s “I Need a Beat” becomes “I Need a Bitch,” Rockwell’s “They’re Always Watching Me” becomes “The Cops Are Watching Me,” and “Rockman, Rockman” turns UTFO’s “Roxanne, Roxanne” into a conversational d-boy anthem, quite clearly a direct inspiration for NWA’s “Dopeman” – but Toddy’s over the top humor often gives way to frighteningly vivid depictions of crack-era Los Angeles.

Despite the very west coast subject matter Toddy’s clearly a student of east coast rap – the Crash Crew gets a shout out on “Batterram,” “This is a Raid” flips Bam’s “Jazzy Sensation” instrumental and every track is subtly soaked in a perpetual Echoplex bleed out like the best park jams were. Mixmaster Ken even makes the decidedly old school choioce of running a “This Old Man” melodic nursery rhyme flow over “Genius Of Love” for like eighty straight bars on “Rap Medley.” By New York standards a lot this stuff would’ve probably sounded pretty played out in 1985, as Run DMC had already begun to usher in the new/next school, but back then the physical distance between the two cities was more than enough to defer onset corniness. And it was that old school New York sensibility specifically that separated Toddy and the Mixmasters from the shiny shirt electro party rap that ruled LA, with its already budding lyrically lyrical lyricism format providing a wider narrative canvas for their reality rap content.

All of this is to say, yes, The Batterram Tape is a true motherfucking full length gangsta rap tape, to my knowledge the earliest existent example of its kind. [5] In fact the opening bars of its signature track - “yes motherfucker the kid is back / with the Jimmy Jam batter ram gangsta rap” - are almost certainly the first time anyone ever said the phrase “gangsta rap” on record.

Some context: In ’85 a teenaged Dr. Dre was still performing sequined jump suit electro “Surgery” with the Wreckin Cru. Ice-T had already dropped “Killers” – and Toddy raps to its instrumental on here – which does critique police brutality, but not specifically from a street perspective. On the b-side he was still in full studded leather b-boy mode. Ice has long been one of the more vocal proponents of Toddy’s influence, too. In this interview with the LA Weekly he’s asked about the influence of Too $hort’s early undergrounds, which he brushes off and instead mentions “Batteram” and “Clucks Come Out At Night.” [5] On the east coast Schoolly D would’ve only just begun to realize his own gangster formula with “PSK” and it would be another year before Ice would jack it for “6 In The Morning,” truly finding his voice. A year after that Cube and Eazy would release their own unsolicited response to Ice with “6 In The Morning Pt. 2,” better known as “Boyz N The Hood.”

“Everybody after us started gettin’ street,” Toddy told Brian Cross in the greatest book ever written about Los Angeles rap, It’s Not About a Salary. “If somebody would tell us they were doing street before we were I want to know what they were saying ’cause I ain’t heard it – nothin’ about dope, nothin’ about cluckheads, nothin’ about nothin’.”

(There are ten tracks posted to this Youtube channel, just under an hour of music. I’m not sure of the correct track order or if this is even the complete tape, though every underground Toddy song I’ve ever read about in the Cross book and elsewhere seems to be represented.)

[1] Notice that Spade’s sing-song style - possibly borrowed from/co-created by Ken on “Rap Medley”? – would later be a huge influence on an entire generation of of New Orleans Bounce artists, including a young Juvenile, although that all might be another post for another day.
[2] Country-rap Rules Everything Around Me.
[3] The parody format would ring out for years to come in LA rap – check fellow Comptonite Hi-C’s own early underground tapes (which seem to have disappeared from the internet, unfortunately) as well as Russ Parr pka Bobby Jimmy’s more PG crossover parodies and, later on, the immortal CHOW DOWN.
[4] Give or take, I guess, whatever other Toddy/Spade/Ken tapes might’ve been floating around before it. If you have them you know where to send them.
[5] I strongly suspect that $hort might’ve smuggled some Toddy tapes up the 5 after he relocated to Oakland – his first commercially released tape, from the same year, also jacks the “Rappin’ Duke” instrumental and some of his flows and vamps on there seem to nod directly to “Batterram."