In retrospect, the whole "Call Me Maybe" phenomenon was weirdly, uncannily meta, as we all found ourselves suddenly and unexpectedly crushing on a singer who arrived out of the blue singing about… a sudden and unexpected crush. At least, we found ourselves crushing on a song about a crush because, despite the intensity of the infatuation, it never really blossomed into a long-term relationship between the public and the singer—much to the public's loss.

A brief recap: Justin Bieber heard the song and tweeted about it in December 2011, promptly amplifying its potential listenership by many millions; by early 2012, Jepsen's single had gone to No. 1 on the Canadian Hot 100, buoyed by national airplay requirements. (NB: The Canadian Illuminati is real.) A deal with Scooter Braun followed, and a change in Billboard's chart methodology to include streaming data facilitated the song's rise. By June it was at No. 1 in the U.S. and, for all intents and purposes, ubiquitous here and everywhere else. (Gotye's equally ubiquitous "Somebody That I Used to Know" robbed it of the top slot on Billboard's Year-End Hot 100 chart, but "Call Me Maybe" still wound up being the best-selling song of 2012, with some 12 million copies sold worldwide.)

Those are the facts of its rise. But what were the deeper reasons for its staying power and its brief conversion into a full-on meme? It's notable that Jepsen's song, with its echoes of early-'00s teen-pop, didn't sound like anything else at the time, on or off the charts; its songwriting, lyrics, and even its production all spoke to an innocence that has become rare in the contemporary music industry—and in pop culture, broadly speaking. (At the same time, the song was just knowing enough, as demonstrated by a video that upended both pinup-girl cliché and heteronormative assumptions about hot neighbor boys.) Sonically, it didn't try too hard. While other pop stars were going for the most expensive-sounding dancefloor effects available, the strings here might have been Garage Band presets. But it still sounded amazing, with every riff in the right place, and unafraid to milk its chorus for every drop of giddy serotonin rush. Lyrically, the song offers a brilliant balance between overstatement and understatement. "Before you came into my life/ I missed you so bad" is a logical impossibility, but it's such a charming sentiment, who cares? And, as for the latter, it's right there in that winking "maybe." It might be the sweetest, slyest song ever written about emotional projection. —Philip Sherburne

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Call Me Maybe"