NEW YORK, NY.- “To really appreciate ‘Smooth,’ you have to embrace how cheesy ‘Smooth’ is,” Rob Thomas said. “It’s right in your face.”

The singer’s voice dropped into a silky baritone, as if he were channeling an infomercial announcer, or a late-night radio DJ. “Man, it’s a hot one,” he crooned, dramatically reciting the song’s opening lyric.

“Smooth” was a centerpiece of “Supernatural,” the 1999 comeback album by Santana and its leader, Carlos Santana. The Mexico-born guitarist’s band had been revered as an innovative force in music since its 1969 debut and had several rock radio standards in its repertoire, including “Evil Ways,” “Black Magic Woman” and “Oye Como Va.” But Santana hadn’t placed a single in the Top 40 since 1982, and with Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and Christina Aguilera dominating the charts, there didn’t seem to be much demand for a 51-year-old guitar hero.

The Arista Records head Clive Davis plotted “Supernatural” for maximum commercial effect, and paired the band with younger artists, including Lauryn Hill, Dave Matthews and Thomas, whose pop-rock band, Matchbox Twenty, had just scored a remarkable four smash singles on its first album, “Yourself or Someone Like You.”

Davis’ machinations worked: “Smooth” hit No. 1 in October and held the position for 12 weeks, into 2000. But the track’s zombie afterlife is what most distinguishes “Smooth.” It spawned an inexplicably funny meme via T-shirts that read, in full, “I’d Rather Be Listening to the Grammy Award-Winning 1999 Hit Smooth by Santana Feat. Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty off the Multi-platinum Album Supernatural.” Through the end of last month, it had been played 1.8 million times on U.S. radio, translating to an audience reach of 13.2 billion, according to data from Luminate. On a recent week alone, it was heard on the airwaves by 5.2 million people.

You can buy Thomas and Santana action figures on Etsy or find a video of “Smooth” sung in the style of the B-52’s. When the sun explodes and human life expires, only cockroaches will remain, and those roaches will build a radio station and keep “Smooth” in heavy rotation.

“We recorded it in one take,” Santana remembered, “and in the middle of the take, time stopped and I entered into a vortex. I was like, ‘Uh-oh. This is big.’”

Billboard has named it the third-most popular song since 1958, as measured by weighted chart positions. It trails “Blinding Lights,” a pop-R&B track by the Weeknd, and Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” which (sorry, Mr. Checker) is a novelty song. In other words, “Smooth” is the most successful rock song. Of. All. Time.

Why?

“The subject forever hangs outside of time — it’s the lover and the beloved,” Santana said in a phone interview from Las Vegas, where he has a long-running residency at House of Blues. “Love is something we need a lot on the radio. Everywhere you turn, there’s more Exorcist movies, more Satan, more Lucifer.”

The bioengineered song was written by a onetime acid jazz musician named Itaal Shur, but Santana didn’t like the lyrics, so Thomas “got a little high,” he said, and wrote new words and melodies. Then he and Shur reworked it, layering hook upon hook. Thomas has always said he wrote “Smooth” about Marisol Maldonado, a Queens-born model of Puerto Rican descent to whom he’s been married since 1999.

“There’s something magical about our relationship,” Thomas said of his wife during a lively video interview from his home in Westchester County. “We think of ourselves as a great love story.”

But, Thomas revealed, he began the lyrics by writing not about Maldonado, but about Carlos Santana. Much of the chorus — “You’re so smooth,” and “It’s just like the ocean under the moon” — were inspired by how he viewed the guitarist. “That was all about Carlos. But I didn’t want a song where I’m singing to him, so I reframed it. ‘Smooth’ was written to put up a banner saying, ‘This is the love that I have.’”

Nearly every song on “Supernatural” was a guajira, an Afro-Cuban rhythm “put together to make lovers get it on,” Santana said. “There’s nothing more sensuous or delicious than a guajira. It drives women crazy.”

The arrangement of “Smooth” includes congas, timbales, a cowbell and a guiro, instruments widely associated with Latin music. But Santana scoffed at the suggestion that the song has a Latin feel: “‘Latin’ is a word that came from Hollywood, for Latin lovers like Fernando Lamas and Cesar Romero. It’s just African rhythms. My music is 90% African.”

While “Smooth” benefited from a tail wind created by the success of stars like Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, one of the reasons it’s been so durable is its centerpiece: the guitar.

The track almost immediately jumps into a snaking, distorted lick from Santana that sits high in the mix. “It’s structured around the star of the song, which is Carlos,” Thomas said. “The guitar is the main event.” Among other things, “Smooth” is one of the final vestiges of how songs were written in the rock era. “Twenty five years ago, song structure was so different than pop radio is now,” he added. “Songs are shorter, there aren’t a lot of bridges and there aren’t really any guitar solos.”

Thomas’ phrasing in the pre-chorus (“And if you said, ‘This life ain’t good enough’”) is slyly compelling because it’s nearly a run-on sentence. His unusual syncopation, which Thomas said is more like a horn line than a vocal, makes him sound breathless with excitement. The effect is ardent and earnest, rather than cool. “I am fueled by uncool,” he confirmed.

Santana and Thomas both benefited tremendously from “Smooth.” “Supernatural” has sold more than 15 million copies in the United States and won a record nine Grammys, surpassing even Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” And, Thomas has said, people no longer stopped him on the street to ask, with confused looks on their faces, if he was the singer in the Goo Goo Dolls or Third Eye Blind.

The two collaborators, born 25 years apart, have very different personalities. Santana is a transcendentalist who speaks in poetic metaphors and says things like “God is my agent” and “Since I was born, I’ve been ordained and I’ve been anointed.”

“Everything Carlos says feels like a song lyric,” Thomas noted.

On the other hand, Thomas is a sentimentalist with a free spirit and a ready laugh that accompanies stories about singing “Smooth” at karaoke or with a wedding band. As rock stars go, he’s the Mick Jagger of making fun of himself, and he even has an anecdote about the time Jagger suggested he change out of an ugly blue shirt he was wearing, but Thomas didn’t immediately get the hint.

He and Santana stay in touch by phone and have discussed other collaborations. “We talk all the time about doing a tour together. There are at least five or six different albums he wants us to do together,” Thomas said. The next step would be for him to visit Santana in Hawaii and write.

“We can sit on the beach, drink tequila, smoke hashish and come up with mediocre pop songs that will last forever,” he said with a knowing laugh.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.