Remembering DJ Rankin: Happy Hardcore's Most Mysterious Producer

The minute my as-yet-unborn son hits adolescence I'm going to sit him down for 'the chat'. No, not that one. There won't be any of the excruciating age-old bluster about birds and bees and mummies and daddies who love each other very much and funny feelings and condoms, because by 2037 Pornhub'll be being dripped intravenously into the arms of new born children. My son'll already know the ins and outs of reverse cowboying and DVDA and my advice will be irrelevant. No, I'm going to sit the smelly little fucker down and dispense some real, grade AAA+ wisdom, some real, honest to Christ's droopy cock, life marinated wisdom.

This particular father to son homily regards one of mans most ancient sins: theft. A sin so old that it was one tenth of God's inspiration as he set the original "Top Ten Don'ts" listicle in stone. You might think that my noxious spawn might already have picked up a few blobs of basic morality during his childhood. Well this is 2037, mate. Everything that could have decayed into shit has decayed into shit. James Corden is a three-term Tory PM, with the rictus grinning shell of Michael Owen's clapped out-near corpse as his pallid deputy. Bono's got a Nobel, while the world still reels in shock after an ageing Drake is suddenly Mark Chapman'd outside of a Toronto Taco Bell by a deranged fan clad in grey turtle neck and Timbs. Yeah, 2037 is a crock of appallingly discoloured shit. How —in this delirious, shit-stained future— am I going to explain to my unborn son why stealing is wrong?

Look, there are loads of supposedly intelligent people that'll tell you that intractable questions about morality have no clear-cut, ready made answer. They are talking out of their over-refined, 1st year philosophy undergrad arses because in this instance there is a very simple, very squeaky, sugar-rush-at-a-fairground tempo two-word answer: DJ Rankin.

DJ Rankin is the human embodiment of petty theft. He is the direct musical equivalent of walking into a corner shop and shovelling Mars bars into the elasticated waist of a Lacoste tracksuit. Every single one of his tunes are joyfully undisguised sped up knock-offs of classic Euro dance cheese tracks interspersed with a smattering of acapella 80's rap lyrics, so far so Limewire crica 2k6. The real Rankin —the inspired squiggle of the artist's brush—is the omnipresent signature: "DJ Rankin in the mix muthafucker" at varying, utterly random points during the track. He beefed with DJ Cammy, collaborated with DJ Pulse and remixed the Titanic theme tune —a triumvirate that guaranteed his supremacy over the extreme end of the DIY Scottish happy hardcore scene and embedded him in the Sony Ericsson of every 14 year old boy in Scotland between 2004-9.

If, as I did, you spent any of your early adolescence in Scotland during that period you'll remember DJ Rankin, most probably through the tinny blare of scary Stevie's phone at the back of the school bus or echoing through sparsely populated train stations after school in small central belt commuter towns. It seemed like the fucker was everywhere you turned —Rankin not Stevie— which meant that for a large number of impressionable teenagers DJ Rankin was their first exposure of any kind of dance music —aside from aside from a few furtive cross country car journeys soundtracked by their dad's Ministry of Sound CD's. Like all first loves, it leaves a deep impression. Only a teenage infatuation can leave a mark deep enough for an adult to leave a comment like "Dj Rankin if you're reading this, we were the dickheads trying to get you to sign our 20 deck at the end of the night at City in Edinburgh" on YouTube.

It wasn't just the music we were enamoured with. There was the acute mystery of Rankin himself, with the only remaining trace a ghostly MySpace page loaded with breast-bearing fan pics taken on incredibly dated webcams. If the ghost of the mid-2000's had a body, this MySpace would be that body. Rumours abound, as rumours do. One forum post suggest he found God and then promptly died. Another asserts that he "played a massive party in Ireland with Akon." The, sadly, most believable one is that he had a chance to play some regular gigs and co-produce some original tracks but fouled it up by being a complete and utter bellend. He now apparently plays semi-regularly at various under-18's nights in Ireland, the Bo'ness Tiestio finally come good.

For all the nostalgia he lets us bathe in, there is absolutely no ducking away from the fact that DJ Rankin was and remains fucking terrible. The sheer level of his balls to the wall thievery meant that he inspired skips worth of disdain and some pretty bare knuckled hatred —as well as the aforementioned nostalgia, from happy hardcore connoisseurs across the internet. Happy hardcore, as Clive Martin correctly noted, is "sweet, thoughtless, ridiculous music" that is quite undeniably fucking massive. It's not a scene marked by subtlety or affected moodiness, it's just a brazen celebration of goofed up, glow-sticked exuberance at 170 BPM. It's a hard scene to get shunned from, but shunned DJ Rankin was. Someone even took the time to make a 9/11 truther expose 'DJ Rankin- The Truth' soundtracked by Rob D's Clubbed To Death. That's not normal vitriol, that's absolutely bonkers.

Consider the level hatred that inspired a certain Jamie G, a full ten years after release, to leave a Youtube comment on the Eamon 'Fuck You Right Back :)' Rankin rework (a personal favourite): "Do people still listen to this shit? It's a complete mess and takes zero talent to do." Well yes Jamie, people do still do listen for exactly the same reasons that up and down the country people put on 'I'm Blue" by Eiffel 65 in a knowingly ironic ten-tinnys-in fug at the end of house parties. It might be shit, but it's undeniably massive shit. It's the kind of shit that calls back all the ridiculous, agonising bits of adolescence. It's the memory of Bebo 'about me' sections, that Mighty Boosh obsession, terrible hair experiments and bottles of Buckfast in children's play parks. It is everything that makes you feel a bit smugger about your supposed flowering into a discerning, cultured adult. It's the kind of shit that actually makes you feel a bit sad.

I'm sure my son will understand.

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