FEATURE: Groovelines: Santana (ft. Rob Thomas) – Smooth

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

  

Santana (ft. Rob Thomas) – Smooth

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THERE is a lot written…

IN THIS PHOTO: Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas/PHOTO CREDIT: Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

about one of the biggest songs of the 1990s. In fact, a song that has gone on to become one of the most acclaimed ever. That said, there is a divisive element to it. Some people who have heard it a lot – when it originally came out in 1999 and since – feel that the earworm has lost any charm. Others outright dislike it. I would recommend that people who are not aware of Smooth by Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas check it out. The first single from Santana’s eighteenth studio album, Supernatural, this was a return to form and prominence of a legendary musician. Smooth was a song that become a colossus and, in the process, gave Santana a new lease of life. Cynics might say the collaborations through the album was an attempt for Carlos Santana to remain relevant by hooking up with more relevant and contemporary artists. I think it was a necessary exploration and diversity from a legendary artist. Someone who did not need to prove himself. Even so, Smooth was a remarkable introduction to Supernatural. A chart hit around the world – including getting to number one in the U.S. -, I am going to get to a couple of features about a huge song. A commercial blockbuster. Before getting to them, I want to bring in a bit of the Wikipedia article for Smooth (who incorrectly list the release date as 15th June, 1999):

Smooth" is a song performed by American rock band Santana and Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty, who sings the lead vocals. It was released on June 15, 1999, as the lead single from Santana's 1999 studio album, Supernatural. It was written by Itaal Shur and Thomas, who re-wrote Shur's original melody and lyrics, and produced by Matt Serletic.

The song was an international success, reaching number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 for 12 consecutive weeks. It was the final number-one hit of the 1990s and the first number-one hit of the 2000s, and the only song to appear on two decade-end Billboard charts. "Smooth" was ranked as the second-most-successful song ever on Billboard's Hot 100 60th Anniversary listing. In 2000, the song won a Grammy Award for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. "Smooth" also peaked at number one in Canada and charted within the top 10 in Australia, Austria, Ireland, and the United Kingdom”.

There is an oral history feature from Rolling Stone that was published in June 2019. That was to mark the twentieth anniversary of Smooth. As it turns twenty-five on 29th June, I wanted to go deep with the song. One that came out in my final months of high school. There was some great Pop released in 1999. Some terrific Dance music. Smooth sort of overtook everything. In a year when Britney Spears was coming through, you could not get away from the hegemony and simply unstoppable momentum of Smooth. I guess, because I heard it as a teenager and have grown accustomed to it, the song sounds natural and familiar. People who might have discovered it a few years ago might feel it is outdated. I think Smooth is a catchy and great track that has this swing and catchiness. A joy that does not ask for anything but the listener’s smile. In 2022, The Number Ones featured Smooth. Although they object to a certain commercial nature and a slight uncool nature of Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 and Carlos Santana joining forces, they could not avoid and deny its appeal and importance:

The last #1 hit of the 20th century wasn’t just an unlikely smash. It was a blockbuster that defied all known laws of cultural consumption. Santana’s “Smooth” could’ve easily been a hackneyed, desperate grab for relevance from an artist who hadn’t had a radio hit in many years and who hadn’t been in the top 10 in decades. Instead, the song took advantage of a few different cultural headwinds and snowballed into its new role as a nearly Thriller-level cultural phenomenon. Nobody could replicate what Carlos Santana and his collaborators did with “Smooth” — not even Carlos Santana himself. The song was a one of one, a freak stars-aligning burst of consensus in an increasingly fracturing pop landscape.

In retrospect, “Smooth,” accidentally or not, rode a few different waves. The song came on the heels of the Latin pop explosion, the manufactured and hyped-up blast of excitement that still made full-on mainstream stars out of figures like Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, and Enrique Iglesias. The song also took advantage of the burst in growly post-grunge soft rock that had put “Smooth” singer and co-writer Rob Thomas’ band Matchbox 20 on top. And “Smooth” could also be considered the final chart eruption from the baby boomer generation that had ruled the charts for decades. It seems entirely fair to say that Carlos Santana was the last boomer icon to top the Hot 100. (Someone like Madonna, who will appear in this column once more, is technically a baby boomer. But Madonna is an icon who happens to be a boomer, whereas Carlos Santana is a boomer icon.)

Those factors all played a role in the story, but I don’t think any of them led to “Smooth” becoming the pop bulldozer that it was. Instead, I attribute the song’s success to something else: It was just too fucking catchy to fail. “Smooth” stacks hooks on top of hooks, and those hooks are the diamond-sharp type that sink into your brain, that can never be extracted. “Smooth” isn’t just stuck in my head right now. It’s stuck in yours, too. If you’re old enough, “Smooth” has been playing on loop in your head for more than 20 years. Right now, this very second, “Smooth” is squirming its way through some part of your cerebellum, and it will remain there until the day you die. It’s eternal. It’s just like the ocean under the moon.

Nobody could’ve predicted that “Smooth” would hit the way that it did, but a whole lot of people had to work hard to put the song in position to succeed. “Smooth” wasn’t a random occurrence that took everyone by storm. Instead, it’s the best-case scenario for record-label meddling, the kind of thing that every A&R rep envisions when they give notes about how an album really needs a single. The people who made “Smooth” all deliberately set out to craft a hit, and they all succeeded to a degree that they couldn’t possibly have imagined.

One of those people was Carlos Santana. In 1999, Santana’s legend status was secure. He’d made hits. He’d sold millions of records. A year earlier, he’d joined the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and he’d convinced one of his heroes, the enigmatic ex-Fleetwood Mac axe-wizard recluse Peter Green, to play with him at the induction ceremony. But that wasn’t enough for Santana. He wanted to get back into the game. He wanted hits.

When he made “Smooth,” Carlos Santana wasn’t a contemporary hitmaker, but he was a familiar name. The man wasn’t starting from zero. He’d already done that. Carlos Augusto Santana Alves was born in the Mexican city of Autlán, and he eventually moved with his family, first to Tijuana and then to San Francisco. Santana’s father was a mariachi musician, and Santana and his brothers all learned guitar when they were young. Carlos Santana loved blues guitarists like BB King and John Lee Hooker, and he played in Tijuana clubs when he was still a little kid. In San Francisco, Santana got into jazz and folk and psychedelia. After high school, he worked as a dishwasher and saved up enough money to buy a Gibson SG. In 1966, when he was 19, he started the Santana Blues Band.

The people at Arista soon found that there were a great many artists who wanted to work with Carlos Santana. They lined up collaborations with Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Everlast, Dave Matthews, and even Santana’s guitar-hero peer Eric Clapton. Even with that lineup, plenty of the people at Arista weren’t convinced; Clive Davis said that the album was nicknamed “Davis’ Folly.” At a certain point, someone from the label told Davis that the label needed to stop spending money on this thing, to put the album out already. Davis refused. The album didn’t have a single yet.

One of the songwriters who pitched a track to Santana was Itaal Shur, the co-founder of the acid jazz group Groove Collective. Shur had one hit under his belt; he’d co-written the neo-soul star Maxwell’s 1996 single “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder),” which peaked at #36. Shur tried to write something that would have the same kind of groove as Santana classics like “Black Magic Woman,” and he came up with “Room 17,” a track about a couple getting together for an illicit tryst in a hotel. Shur recorded a demo for the track, arranging everything himself, and he was convinced that it was a hit. Pete Ganbarg loved the music, but he didn’t think the lyrics would work for Carlos Santana at all. Santana was a family man, and he wouldn’t want to get into anything sexual like that. So Ganbarg said that he could use the song’s groove but that another songwriter would have to come up with the lyrics and the vocal melody. A publishing exec suggested Rob Thomas.

Rob Thomas was (and is) 25 years younger than Carlos Santana. Thomas was born in Germany, where his father was stationed in the Army, six months after Santana released Santana III. (When Rob Thomas was born, the #1 song in America was Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”) Thomas had a rough, chaotic upbringing in South Carolina and Florida. He dropped out of high school, spent a few months in jail for car theft, and went homeless for a while. Eventually, Thomas became the singer for an Orlando club band called Tabitha’s Secret. When that group broke up, Thomas and two other ex-members started a new band called Matchbox 20.

Matchbox 20 signed with Lava Records and released their debut album Yourself Or Someone Like You in 1996. At first, the record went nowhere, and the band almost lost their contract. But a radio station in Alabama started playing their song “Push,” so Lava made it a single. On the strength of “Push” and the similarly yarly “3AM,” Matchbox 20 took off nationwide, and Yourself Or Someone Like You eventually went platinum 12 times over. (Thanks to the goofy-ass chart rules of the ’90s, “Push” and “3AM” never made the Hot 100. But Matchbox 20 will eventually appear in this column, so we’ll get deeper into their story then.)

When Matchbox 20 got done with the years that they spent touring behind their debut album, Rob Thomas moved in with his girlfriend in New York. One of Pete Ganbarg’s publisher friends told him that Rob Thomas was a brilliant songwriter but that he was “doing nothing except smoking pot and playing PlayStation.” (That sounds amazing to me. My guy was living the dream.) Thomas spent an afternoon working on the song, and he eventually hit on the idea that he should write about his girlfriend, the half-Spanish and half-Puerto Rican model Marisol Maldonado. In that Rolling Stone oral history, Thomas said that he was kicking around a few ideas and that he “realized somewhere in the middle of it that I had this wealth of information because I had this smokin’ hot Latin girlfriend already.”

Thomas took a crack at the song, and then he honed it further with Itaal Shur, who lived a couple of blocks away from him. “Smooth” turned into an ode to a “Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa,” even though Maldonado is from Queens. On the song, Thomas promises to “change my life to better suit your mood, ’cause you’re so smooth.” He liked the idea that he could be singing to a woman or that he could be describing the way that Carlos Santana plays. Thomas recorded the demo, thinking that another singer would be on the record. (Thomas had envisioned George Michael, who would’ve crushed it.) Carlos Santana didn’t like the “Smooth” demo at first because he thought it sounded too close to “Guajira,” a song that Santana had recorded in 1971. But when Clive Davis wrote to Santana and told him that “Smooth” was a hit, Santana agreed to record it.

Eventually, everyone decided that Rob Thomas should sing on “Smooth,” and they went through all the music-business headaches necessary to clear Thomas’ appearance. Since Matchbox 20 recorded for a competing label, these were considerable, but they got it done. Thomas finally met Carlos Santana for the first time when he joined Santana and Matchbox 20 producer Matt Serletic to record “Smooth.” In Leila Cobo’s book Decoding “Despacito”, Thomas remembers the first thing Santana ever said to him: “Hey, you must be married to a Latin woman; that’s the kind of thing a white guy married to a Latin woman would say.” I find that to be fucking hilarious. In that same book, Santana himself says that he did indeed tell Rob Thomas that: “He had a different type of sassiness about him.” That’s hilarious, too, not least because it’s true.

In general, I think of Rob Thomas as one of the most generic rock singers of an era that was absolutely infested with generic rock singers. But on “Smooth,” Thomas does manage to conjure a certain level of sassiness. (He says he was just imitating George Michael, the guy he’d imagined singing the song in the first place, which tracks.) There’s something vaguely uncomfortable about this chesty-bellow guy trying to get all soulful with it, but Thomas mostly succeeds. There’s a nice interplay between Thomas’ voice and Santana’s guitar solos. They know to stay out of each other’s way, to complement one another. Santana’s leads are big and clean and melodic, and they add drama to what Thomas does. For his part, Thomas does a nice job going from the sexy-crackle verses to the vein-throb chorus.

The whole thing is just catchy. It was always catchy, from the first time anyone heard it. The groove has a bright sparkle to it, all these horns and pianos and congas winding their way though the track. Thomas growls out stuff that will be stuck in our collective heads for all of eternity. You know all the lines already. “Man, it’s a hot one.” “My muñequita.” “Give me your heart, make it real, or else forget about it.” Those “Smooth” lines — the “it’s a hot one” bit in particular — become memes every few months because they’re just stuck in our shared brain-space”.

I am going to end with a feature from Esquire. Published on 29th, 2019, it was published to mark twenty years of a twentieth century classic. There is another feature I would advise people to check out. So much context and insight into a track that was a massive smash at the end of the decade. Smooth was a song that so many took to heart right away. I still thing it remains relevant and fresh twenty-five years later:

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.

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

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.

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

“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.”

Supernatural’s basic blueprint was cribbed from Deuces Wild, a 1997 album that paired B.B. King with a collection of established artists, including Bonnie Raitt, Van Morrison, and D’Angelo. Although that effort didn’t impress reviewers (Rolling Stone concluded that its “juke joint authenticity” was smothered by a “Ritz Carlton budget”), Supernatural’s creators thought they might improve on the idea.

Just as Ganbarg was nearing a panic, he encountered the first of several lucky breaks that occurred during the creation of “Smooth”: Evan Lamberg, an industry friend, called out of the blue to ask if he still needed songs. Lamberg introduced Ganbarg to a young musician named Itaal Shur, who was developing a salsa track called “Room 17” about an illicit hotel rendezvous. Ganbarg loved the basic components, but he found Shur’s lyrics bizarre and kind of tactless.

“It was about a groupie meeting Santana after the concert in a hotel room,” Ganbarg recalls. “Which, if you know anything about Carlos Santana, is 180 degrees opposite of who he is.” (Shur, for his part, maintains the song was simply about two long-estranged lovers cheating on their significant others.) After some negotiations, Shur agreed to polish the track with Rob Thomas, who had just wrapped a tour with Matchbox Twenty and, in Ganbarg’s recollection, “was living in an apartment downtown in Manhattan with his girlfriend, and he was smoking pot and he was playing Playstation.” In other words: enjoying the trappings of a blossoming semi-stardom.

That Shur and Thomas worked so well together—and so quickly—turned out to be another happy accident. The two went from complete strangers to heads-down collaborators virtually overnight. Thomas changed the key of “Room 17” and added a chorus. He re-worked the lyrics to de-emphasize adultery and focus instead on a lusty yet G-rated commitment to his fiancée, the model Marisol Maldonado (eventually described as his “Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa”). It all felt easy, casual.

“It was pretty much songwriting 101,” Thomas says. “At the time, I didn’t think there was any significant moment happening there. We were just kind of in [Shur’s] apartment studio chilling out.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Meanwhile, each tweak felt to Ganbarg like a form of pain relief, a chiropractic adjustment. He allowed himself to believe that maybe, possibly, “Smooth” could turn into the hit he so desperately needed—a song that could move both asses and records. When he played it for his boss Clive Davis, a notoriously tough critic, Davis agreed: They were onto something.

Just one problem: Santana wasn’t interested. He required reassurances from Davis, who had first signed him in the 1960s, whose opinion he deeply respected, and who he had been chanting about, in compulsive sets of 27, during meditation sessions.

“So I have to go in sheepishly to Clive Davis’s office with my tail between my legs and say, ‘Clive, I need your help,’” Ganbarg recalls. “‘You’ve got to tell Carlos that this song is a hit, or else he won't record it.’” Davis dictated a note to Santana, which Ganbarg hurried off to fax. A few days later, Santana relented. He would record the song—as long as Rob Thomas did it with him, live.

“It was pretty much songwriting 101. At the time, I didn’t think there was any significant moment happening there.”

“I believed him a little bit, but I didn’t believe completely,” Santana says of Thomas. “Something happens when Brother Rob Thomas sings at the same time with the Santana band and myself in the same room. All of a sudden, two and two become seven instead of two and two becomes four.”

If there’s one thing that’s remarkable about the recording of “Smooth,” it’s how plainly unremarkable it all felt in the moment. Yes, Santana himself now describes the experience as a “tsunami of positivity,” devoid of egos and full of “EN. ER. GEE;” and yes, he gifted Rob Thomas an elaborate tapestry as soon as they walked into the studio; and yes, he asserts that the forces of gravity and time may have dissipated momentarily. But for many of the musicians involved, it felt routine—an-easier-than average session in service of a simple tune. They recorded live, ran through the track a few times, liked what they heard. Then they went home.

“I listen to it, and it's like, ‘Oh! it's like a song!’” says bassist Benny Rietveld. “We were used to just recording jams.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

“The only thing that I remember is just trying to get it to feel right,” adds drummer Rodney Holmes. “Just doing your job: You show up at the studio, you've learned the music. So now, it’s ‘Let’s execute.’ And that was it.”

Simple in theory. Yet it’s worth pausing for a moment to point out that the musicians on “Smooth” are not exactly a gaggle of toothless vagabonds, busking for quarters. They are elite, hall-of-fame-level players with eye-popping resumés and decades of experience. This is perhaps an obvious point, but it’s also one of the most important—and overlooked—aspects of the song’s success.

“We play like there’s no tomorrow,” Santana says. “We play like if you’re gonna get a heart attack by getting to that note, then gosh darn it, get the heart attack. But get the note.”

Everyone agreed the song sounded like a hit. But executives at Arista were still worried about the mechanics of selling America on something new from Santana. So they made a shrewd choice: When distributing the single, they left off the guitarist’s name, marking the CDs simply as “Smooth” and “Mystery Artist.”

Soon, the song’s magnitude, its infectious omnipresence, began to dawn on the creators themselves. For some, the realization came through blunt repetition: hearing it in the grocery store, then in a nearby pharmacy shortly thereafter. Others flipped between radio stations that were playing it simultaneously, or heard it blasting from a beat-up Pontiac in Hawaii, or were simply told by their wives: This could actually be something.

Rob Thomas’ own “aha” moment was goofy and cinematic. “It was one of those weird things that never happens anymore,” he says. “I was just walking down West Broadway and I stopped at a crosswalk, and this car full of hot girls—a convertible—pulled up at the red light and they were blaring ‘Smooth.’ It took me a second to realize what I was listening to. So my first thought was, when I see a bunch of hot girls in a car listening to it, there’s something happening here.” Two days later, in Los Angeles, he was walking through a hotel lobby. “This big fucking guy, just fully tatted, this crazy dude, comes running over to me and he’s like, ‘That fucking Carlos track is on fire, man! Good job!’ I was just like, ‘Oh shit! All right. That’s something.’”

The song was released as a single on June 29, 1999. It was certified gold by September 13 and platinum by November 9. It was the first number one song of Santana’s career, and it stayed at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 for 12 consecutive weeks (and in the top 10 for 30 weeks). Then it topped the charts in 10 other countries. At the following year’s Grammy Awards, it won Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. Santana won Album of the Year for Supernatural, Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocals (for “Maria Maria”), and Best Pop Instrumental Performance (for “El Farol”). Nine Grammies in total.

The awards provided a deluge of delayed recognition for Santana, a living legend who over his decades-long career had only won once, in 1988, in the Best Rock Instrumental Performance (Orchestra, Group or Soloist) category. In one photo from the evening, Thomas, Santana, and Clive Davis cradle their statues, each wearing a befuddled smile. Santana, in particular, looks ecstatic. The awards teeter cartoonishly in each man’s arms, as though the Recording Academy had backed up a dump truck and deposited them.

In the expansive canon of American popular music, there are various species of earworms. Some are harmless; some are venomous. Some wriggle in and out in mere minutes. The most powerful kind, though, are those that stick around despite a hapless listener’s best efforts at self-preservation. You really have to hand it to these fuckers: They enter the brain and immediately make themselves at home. They hang pictures, arrange furniture, sign a long-term lease. It goes without saying that they never, ever move out.

Like the cannonball gimmick, “Smooth,” as a cultural product, scrambles our receptors. Its omnipresence has created a nearly infinite spectrum of strong affinities and hostilities, some of which are difficult to parse. It remains fertile for parody—whether with memes that inquire whether today is, in fact, “a hot one,” or with T-shirts that proclaim: “I’d rather be listening to the Grammy Award-winning 1999 hit Smooth by Santana feat. Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 off the multi-platinum album Supernatural.” At its worst, it is a tongue-in-cheek weapon to be deployed at captive audiences (dinner parties, car passengers); at its best, a colossal hit, crafted with equal parts joy, virtuosity, and cold calculation. In the middle, where most of us reside, it is the largest and most inclusive in-joke of all time. In all cases, the best approach is to simply surrender.

“Here’s the key to miracles and blessings,” Santana says. “Do you have the willingness to allow the spirit to come in? And do you have the discipline to get out of the way?”

So yes, it is possible to hate “Smooth” for the cynical mechanics of its creation, for its permanent residence in our heads and homegoods stores, for the line about a “Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa.” Yet because the song’s success is self-inflicted through decades of our own weddings and parties and makeout sessions, any hatred is also, by definition, a form of self-hatred.

None of this, by the way, is lost on its authors, who like you and I cannot seem to escape it. They continue to hear it at Whole Foods, on their own device’s shuffle function, on commercial radio, and when they are traveling in other countries.

“Even today, in all honesty, I’m OK if I never hear that song,” Thomas says. “When I say that, I love playing it and I love performing it. And I would play it every night, and I have a great joy every time that I do it. But I’m OK if I don’t hear it again”.

On 29th June, it will be twenty-five years since Smooth was released. A song that spent three months atop the U.S. chart, you still hear it a lot today. I know its creators and writers might feel tired of hearing it, they know how important the song is. A single that introduced Santana’s Supernatural and very much put him back in the spotlight, I really like the song. I first heard it at high school and was instantly bonded to it. Regardless of any cynicism and accusations the song is cool or cloying, it is a belter that is guaranteed to…

GET you moving.