Weekend Rewind: 'Days Go By' by Dirty Vegas

It’s often difficult to pinpoint exactly when you’ve started to acquire a taste for something. The early 2000s were a crucial trial period for pop and dance music that set the stage for dance music’s eventual explosion. Some time between 2002 and 2003, a radio hit that won the Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording also became synonymous with a certain Mitsubishi commercial.

Dirty Vegas’s “Days Go By” was one of the very early discoveries that led to my dance music fandom. This was a time when there was essentially no verbal differentiation between style, and everything was naively labeled “techno” by the ill-informed. “Days Go By” builds on a groovy bassline and hypnotic, love-stricken vocals that can only be overshadowed by it’s iconic music video. The video features an older man in a suit b-boying outside a sandwich shop in California. A group of observers narrate the legend behind the man’s display, and learn that he had lost the love of his life because he couldn’t stop dancing. He dances in the same spot, during the same time every year, from sunrise to sunset in hopes of finding her again. A simple yet touching story appropriately conjures nostalgic feelings, reminding us why this song was so successful in so many dimensions.

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