How the Santana and Rob Thomas Song 'Smooth' Became as Essential as Sex It is easy—perhaps too easy—to dislike "Smooth," the Grammy Award-winning 1999 hit by Carlos Santana featuring Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty off the multi-platinum album Supernatural. The song's combination of tepidity and synthetic spice is like a dry English muffin misted with Tapatio. Its introductory drum fill, iconic to some, is gaudy and triggering to others. Even Santana himself wasn't a fan when he first heard it.
Two years earlier, the 50-year-old guitarist was staring down a mid-career crisis. Despite years of steady output and critical acclaim, he felt out of touch with younger audiences and regretful that his teenage children no longer heard him on commercial radio. So, acting on the advice of his wife (and his longtime spirit guide, which he calls Metatron), Santana arranged to meet with the record producer Clive Davis at a lavish bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel. The two agreed that staging a proper comeback would require an arsenal of contemporary hits; and Davis, who signed artists such as Bruce Springsteen and Pink Floyd, believed he knew just how to get them.
"Give me half the album and trust that I will find material that is integral to your artistry," Davis told Santana. "The other half of the album will be whatever you want it to be."
The result was Supernatural, which featured a buffet of '90s hitmakers, including Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill, and Dave Matthews. "Smooth" was the very last single Davis and his team delivered to Santana, who at first thought it sounded too rough, "like a painting that needed to be completed," he said. It also reminded him of "Guajira," a slinking, piano-driven track with a similar intro, from his 1971 album Santana III. He wasn't sure about the fit, or the vibe, or even Rob Thomas. It wasn't the sort of song his band was in the habit of playing.
In retrospect, that was precisely the point. From the instant it hit U.S. airwaves in June 1999, the track seemed destined to jackhammer its way into America's consciousness. Thanks to its key personnel—an aging virtuoso and a rising pop rock star—the demographic potential was almost comically broad. And although haters deny it, the song's musicianship is slick and impeccable.
It also didn't hurt that 1999's pop music environment was uniquely primed for a hit of this magnitude. Latin pop crossovers were ascendant, with Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca," which debuted that March, as recent proof of concept. Meanwhile, U.S. album sales were soaring and Napster, the file-sharing service that would eventually firebomb much of the music industry's critical infrastructure, was only a few weeks old.
Twenty years after its release, "Smooth" enjoys the gilded status of America's second-most popular song of all time, right behind Chubby Checker's "The Twist" and right above Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife," according to Billboard. Its potency derives largely from the fact that it is impossible to not react to—whether with excitement, exasperation, derision, or muddled, semi-ironic affection. It was meme bait before memes even existed: the rare cultural product whose very existence morphed into a sort of provocation.
Such longevity, we hate to admit but know deep down, is a referendum on us. "Smooth" has woven itself into our cultural DNA. Yet to understand why, exactly, the song demands our acknowledgment (and, perhaps, even our respect), it's crucial to first understand the mechanics of its creation and ascendance. For the last six months, I've been talking to the people involved in the song's creation, including Santana, Thomas, and Davis. The story they tell is a bit of a paradox—a tale of both deep cynicism and wide-eyed idealism; of cold industry calculus and luminous virtuosity. It contains lessons about joy, anxiety, and luck, and how, every so often, the three combine to produce something eternal.
"This song belongs with something that people need every day in their lives: air, water and sex," Santana says. "You can have food—granola, or whatever. But basically, air for your lungs, water for your body, and s-e-x for your psyche."
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