The Internet Joke: Smooth — Santana f. Rob Thomas
Here’s What’s Interesting now has a focus: Music! If you like music, stay tuned. If you don’t, unsubscribe. Few things in life are this simple.
Man, it’s a hot one
Like seven inches from the midday sun
- Carlos Santana f. Rob Thomas “Smooth”
Every indeterminate amount of time (an internet season, if you will), the internet requires a song to serve as its meme lingua franca — it’s common denomination of mockery and jokes.
Unlike Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”, which had a very specific purpose (tricking someone into thinking you had sent them something fantastic ), the meme song is malleable and often unexplained.
With apologies to the runner up, Smashmouth’s All Star, that song is 90s Latin-by-way-of-Orlando “Smooth” by Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas.
This week alone:
- First, it was the source of a viral Olympics dressage routine.
- Second, it was used to illustrate by much time Katie Ledecky won her 800 Meter Freestyle gold medal race in a now removed Tweet (thanks to the broadcast copyright police)
- As a result of the recent attention, GQ posted a completely fabricated, surrealist Oral History of “Smooth.”
But it’s lineage as internet joke predates all of this — if you want a very boring account of that, click here.
So, objectively, why is this very bad song one that remains while more abject ones fade from memory?
Man it’s a hot one.
This is a very bad and very memorable opening lyrics. It doesn’t seem like anything anyone would say, outside of a imaginary folksy shop keeper in a low-budget horror movie. THIS is what you’re leading with, Rob Thomas.
It’s also the re-emergence of Santana, who the Gen X/Millennial generation sort of knows as the guitar virtuoso from the 70s. Everyone knows Oye Como Va. But the thought in 1999 was a simple one: why exactly is Santana now on the radio & MTV with Matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas right now?
But, really, it’s the video. The combination of Rob Thomas’ ill-conceived clothing choices (first an Asian-influenced Dragon shirt and a very Cowboy hat) and the outsized reaction of the multiethnic, beautiful women, seemingly put into a trance by Thomas’ voice and Santana’s guitar playing.
The highlight of course is a woman in a skin-tight peach? shirt doing some sort of swimmer routine directly in front of Santana.
Watching a music video — especially one with male protagonists — often requires suspension of disbelief about the level of interest the women have in the subject matter. This one belies belief.
So, if you want to impress one of those people who know internet things before anyone else in your life, lean in and whisper: “you’re my reason for reason; The step in my groove.”
