Santana ft. Rob Thomas — "Smooth"
Man, it's a hot one. The Santana–Rob Thomas collaboration that refused to leave the radio, straddled the millennium at #1, and swept its Grammy categories. Decades later it's still the eternal-summer song the internet won't let die.
"Smooth" started life as an instrumental called "Room 17" by songwriter Itaal Shur, whose melody and lyrics were rewritten by Matchbox Twenty's Rob Thomas for Santana's comeback album Supernatural. Thomas cut a demo, and after hearing it Santana decided Thomas himself should sing the final version — turning a guitar legend's guest-vocalist slot into one of the strangest and most successful pairings in pop history. The single hit radio on June 15, 1999, and did not let go.
The numbers remain absurd. "Smooth" spent twelve consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 beginning October 23, 1999, making it both the final number-one hit of the 1990s and the first number-one hit of the 2000s — the song literally straddled the millennium. It was Santana's first chart-topper ever, arriving twenty-eight years after "Black Magic Woman" had peaked at number four in 1971. At the 42nd Grammy Awards it took Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals.
And then it never went away. When Billboard published its Hot 100 60th-anniversary rankings, "Smooth" placed as the second-most-successful song in the chart's entire history — and its number-one rock song. In the 2010s, especially during the summer of 2016, the opening line "man, it's a hot one" was reborn as an internet meme, resurfacing every heat wave since. Half the country hears the first two seconds of that guitar riff and involuntarily thinks of a Sears portrait studio's worth of 1999 memories; the other half just turns it up.
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