If you’re not stuck on the song “Despacito,” my guess is that you haven’t heard it — or heard it enough.  Not that it’s necessarily a great song, but the Justin Bieber remix of a Puerto Rico club tune seems to have redefined what a hit tune means.  Its music video is now the most watched on YouTube of all time at more than 3 billion views, with a “massive” 1.8 billion audience spins on radio.

So what explains the success?  Vox.com dug in to find out, and writer Alex Abad-Santos credits factors ranging from politics (protesting Donald Trump’s anti-Hispanic rhetoric) to recent music trends to an archetypal repeating chord progression.

Certainly there have been other Spanish language hits that have gone mainstream in the past, from “La Bamba” to “Macarena” to “Rico Suave.” But this song feels different, in that it’s not a cliche folk tune or gimmick but a legitimate Spanish-language dance and rap song. Justin Bieber’s popularity and vocals on the remix certainly opened the song to a whole new audience, but that only gets you so far.

The article is worth reading in full, but in particular it discusses the power of the particular chord progression. In this case, it’s an ambiguous major/minor progression made famous in the 1990s in songs like “(What If God Was) One Of Us?”

It’s also hard to deny the power of a mainstream Spanish-language song at a time of rising racial strife and hatred toward immigrants in the U.S. My guess is that for many listeners, the song feels like a bit of a protest and an affirmation of the power of diversity. And there are few better ways to experience that diversity than through something as universal as music.

Here’s the original version of the song, to compare to the remix: