There’s probably some seldom-used word that captures the exact teenage sensation of the first time you realize a band you’ve loved all your life has a new record in stores. After a long break or maybe a bunch of strange side projects and winding paths suddenly there was something big and complete on the horizon, a future where you had only ever imagined a past. After a childhood listening to Santana’s Greatest Hits on every possible road trip, Supernatural felt like a miracle.
Now it’s one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, moving more than The Wall and Sgt. Pepper, falling just short of Brothers in Arms. Chances are that you owned a copy if you were inside a record store anytime around the turn of the millennium. But it had a mild start, debuting at Number 19 on the Billboard 200. I was there on release date to grab it, along with two other albums we’ll feature in upcoming pieces, and I remember having to walk back to the Rock section and fetch it out of the stacks among Santana’s other albums. There was very little fanfare, lost as it was in an all-timer week for pop music. (Also in the Top Ten or in their first week in release: Mirrorball, Millennium, Wild Wild West, Californication, …Baby One More Time, On the 6, Fanmail, Enema of the State. 1999 was one hell of a year for records.) I was pretty sure I’d be the audience of one in my peer group for Supernatural.
Meanwhile, the lead single was about to turn into one of the biggest songs of all time.
“Smooth” is undeniable. It’s an insidious earworm of pop craftsmanship that throws together two musicians who shouldn’t exist on the same planet and turns it into the perfect summer jam. Even if you hate the damn thing–and I get why you would–it’s still easy to understand why it was the number-one hit of Summer 1999, why any given four-word phrase from the lyrics leads to a reference. (Has anyone been able to say that anything is a “hot one” for the past quarter-century?) The single leaked to radio in mid-May, so if you were tuned into Z100 or WPLJ like I was then you had already heard it roughly ten billion times before the album itself dropped. You had to stick around for the end of that solo, the most Santana-sounding trills that heralded the return of a 70s master. This tune was Santana-as-hitmaker, not Santana-as-jazz-noodler or Santana-as-whatever-the-hell-“Winning”-is. “Smooth” was the rave-up of “Everybody’s Everything” taken to big 90s extremes, and my base-childhood sensations needed that immediately. If the rest of the record was like this then we were in for a throwback classic.
The great thing about Supernatural was that it wasn’t like this song at all. Half the record was classic Santana jams, things that felt like iterations of “Jingo-lo-ba” and “Samba Pa Ti”. These were what I was hoping for when I heard “new Santana album”. The rest was filled with guest spots, providing us with the artists we loved earlier in the 90s because of our parents (Eric Clapton), our older siblings (Dave Matthews), or because we never really got some prime stadium jams out of our systems (Everlast). Hey, remember when Everlast’s solo album sold multiple millions of copies? Can you name a single song off of it other than “What It’s Like”? He gets a better dread-filled little murder ballad here called “Put Your Lights On”, which works with his post-angina grovel growl better than the previous socially-conscious story song. I’m honestly amazed it didn’t do better as a single, but maybe the song that feels like a perfect Halloween background track shouldn’t have a release date in mid-August.
The constant across all these disparate guest tracks is Santana’s guitar tone, which is a nice way to say that Supernatural at times feels disjointed. If you include the hidden track at the end it stretches to a near-interminable seventy-five minutes; that’s exactly twice the length of Abraxas, and there’s no “Black Magic Woman” on this album. I’d venture that most people who bought Supernatural never got all the way through “The Calling” and phase two of Eric Clapton trying to remind people he didn’t just write syrupy ballads. But as much as Supernatural doesn’t truly hang together, that also becomes one of its great strengths. Santana was attempting to get back into hit-making style after a decade of lost-in-the-woods jazz noodling, and we were witnessing him giving a shot to everything he had missed in popular music. “Smooth” was his first number-one hit with any incarnation of Santana as a band or person and his first top-forty appearance since the ultra-smooth nothing “Hold On” back in 1982. The very try-this nature of getting more hits on the album had worked.
And then “Maria Maria” went to number one as well! It was almost as big of a hit as “Smooth” was, staying on top of the charts for ten weeks in the hangover of 2000. The Product G&B were nowhere near as established as everybody else on the record; they were just Wyclef protégés who had a few moments on Pras’ Ghetto Supastar. (No, not that track. The other ones, deeper on the album.) They didn’t know who Santana was, telling Billboard years later that they thought he was one of the guitar techs when they first met him. “You would have thought he was somebody’s grandfather coming from the bus stop, real talk.” Clapton begged to be on the record, these guys just sort of wander in and drop one of the hottest tracks of the new millennium. They never released a proper solo album but they did get sampled on one of DJ Kahled’s worst recent tracks, so at least they’ve stayed in the public consciousness. What hadn’t yet been gathered up from 90s MTV culture was all dumped into “Maria Maria”: self-referential lyrics, a semi-effective beat sample from the mid-70s, Wyclef saying whatever comes to his mind because Wyclef doesn’t do two takes. It’s absolutely irresistible.
Supernatural was a bit of everything for everyone, and that’s why it works. It’s not really coherent in an album-oriented way. You’ll find no song suites here, few ties from song to song aside from the clean production and Santana’s immortal riffing. Cee-Lo Green wanders in at one point. You’re at a festival for an hour and a bit, each combination of performers trotting out their genres and trying to impress the master of ceremonies. There’s no surprise that everything coalesces when Santana is given ground to do his thing. “Migra” was my favorite song on Supernatural and it’s still a phenomenal rave-up, just a little jewel of what Santana always did best.
There are certain albums that grow in the telling, that start in one spot and slowly let every song on offer intertwine with your life. No matter how you approached Supernatural, as a longtime Santana fan or from pop radio with “Smooth” or the later incessant spins of “Maria Maria”, it seemed to be everywhere until the next summer. It was ball games and block parties and cookouts, school dances and dates and blaring out of every car stereo on your drive home. Supernatural was a miracle. You don’t get that overarching force out of one album without a staggering unified monoculture, and 1999 might have been the last time we had even a semblance of that. Play “Smooth” in a room full of Generation Y and you’ll get one response and a hundred responses. Because a record that builds like that becomes culture defining and yet super personal.
There has to be a word beyond simple Nostalgia to grasp the way a heart can rend listening to a silly pop song. Something more than “hey, I remember that” and intra-generational jokes and crass commercial selling of your base memories back to you. Because I can hear “Love of My Life” and recognize that Dave Matthews is trying his hardest to impress Santana even after that dreadfully silly ad lib, I can hear everything anyone says against that one tone both guitarist and singer employ on every track, I can ding the writers for rhyming “sunlight” and “moonlight”, and yet it doesn’t matter. Because some things you feel like you’re back in the moment. And I remember that freezing cold New Year’s Eve, that non-zero chance the whole world was gonna end on some computer glitch or something, and how that tune felt perfect in the right then and there. I was a kid and everything was a first. I just happened to be living in a time that meant firsts–first big parties, first times away from home, first teenage screw-ups, first big triumphs, first loves–were happening right alongside big celebratory cultural moments. There was every reason for me to be predisposed to love the hits of 1999 on a deeply personal level when I look back at them. It’s going to color everything in this series. Temper your expectations.
Everything grows in the telling. You’re a fan of a band because your parents played the greatest hits in the car so you buy the new album for yourself. Now you have a soundtrack that’s all yours. The album blows up and there’s a copy in every home. Now you have commonalities all over the world. Maybe you were fifteen or close to it and everything seemed to matter so much. Now it’s a quarter-century later and you’re wondering if anything will ever hit the way it did the day a Hot One meant seven inches from the midday sun.
Maybe it won’t. But you still have something imperfect and universal that became something perfect and all your own. There’s no street cred in loving Supernatural and there wasn’t back then either. It’s a little bit corny, a little bit scattershot from an artist who was already fifty-two during recording. It wasn’t young and hip even when it was. But it’s the world’s and it’s yours. That’s to say: it had my heart and it was real. I won’t forget about it.