From June 1999 until way past Y2K, Smooth by Santana featuring Rob Thomas was played nonstop. You literally couldn’t go 20 minutes without hearing the song. You heard it in the car. You heard it at school. You heard it in liquor stores. Hell, sometimes you’d hear “Man, it’s a hot one” in your head for no particular reason.
To say the song was pervasive would be an understatement. It permeated every last pore of America for months on end. In an era before iPods, DSL internet and satellite radio, there was no way to avoid Smooth by Santana featuring Rob Thomas when it was being played nonstop.
Now, it’s important to note this is by no means a bad song. We’re not talking about the Vengaboys here. Smooth is a perfectly acceptable track. But nothing about it screamed “this song is going to be played constantly for months on end”.
To this day, that remains a mystery. Were people really clamoring to hear Smooth so much? It seems doubtful. The track itself wasn’t one you put on repeat. There are plenty of songs from Matchbox 20 contemporaries that wouldn’t mind listening to over and over again. Sex and Candy and My Own Worst Enemy are just a few that spring to mind.
But Smooth? It’s not even in the top three of Matchbox 20 songs.
And let’s make one thing perfectly clear here, Smooth is a Matchbox 20 track more than anything else. People claim this is a Carlos Santana song but it’s not. Thomas wrote the lyrics and melody to Smooth and even had the producer of Matchbox 20’s debut album help record the final version.
Sure, Santana is there, but giving him credit for Smooth would be like giving Jay-Z credit for Heartbreaker when Mariah Carey clearly did most of the work.
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Why was Smooth by Santana featuring Rob Thomas played nonstop?
The answer to this question is relatively simple. Smooth by Santana featuring Rob Thomas was played nonstop because it found a way to break radio station formats. Look no further than my hometown of Sacramento for proof of this.
We had pop music (107.9 The End), modern/alternative Rock (KWOD 106,5) and adult contemporary stations (100.5 The Zone). While each one was fairly siloed, some songs were able to break through and get airtime on two stations. However, Smooth did the unthinkable and somehow found a sound that was playable on all three. This broke radio in Sacramento and countless other markets across the country.
Ultimately, Smooth by Santana featuring Rob Thomas felt like it was being played nonstop because every non-hard rock radio station in the country was playing it. Only Butterfly by Crazy Town has managed to do something similar, but that’s a story for another time.
At the end of the day, Smooth was an okay-ish song that was played at a historic frequency which will likely never be replicated again. And I, for one, am thankful for that because experiencing this was the worst.
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