Lauren Laverne’s interview with Louis Theroux on Desert Island Discs is still making me smile, days after Friday’s broadcast. After a highly respectable selection including Marvin Gaye, the Smiths and Bob Dylan, Theroux went on to introduce, in typical throat-clearing fashion, a song that reminded him of his early romance with his now-wife Nancy Strang, whom he met at a BBC Christmas party in 2002.

This song had come on at a nightclub they had gone to on their third or fourth date, explained Theroux, and seeing Strang dance to it was “a kind of catalysing moment”. “I just thought, ‘Wow’,” he said, apparently entirely deadpan. “ The way she moved, I don’t know – she just seemed to transcend and go into a different dimension of physical movement.”

By this point, of course, I was itching to find out what romantic song it was. What beautiful melody could possibly have cast such a spell over this woman, bewitching Britain’s most unflappable man, lifting them both up out of the physical dimension and into a different one? Perhaps I Feel Love by Donna Summer, or another similarly shimmery disco classic by Giorgio Moroder?

But no: the song that Theroux has a “special soft spot” for was What’s Luv? by Fat Joe, featuring Ashanti – a song that starts with: “Put the fuckin’ mic on” and for nearly four minutes lurches between unfinished lustful thoughts, among them Joe’s request for a “chick with thick hips” of either “the office type” or the type that “likes to strip”.

It is pleasing to imagine at what moment in this song, exactly, Theroux swooned. Was it right at the start, when Joe firmly makes it clear that he “don’t go down, lady”? Or when he halfheartedly requests a threesome?

What delighted me about this anecdote is, of course, that it is not just critically acclaimed songs that soundtrack our lives; it’s also the ones we can’t escape. What’s Luv? spent 20 weeks in the Billboard Hot 100 in 2002, making it ubiquitous at the time of Theroux and Strang’s first date. By the same logic of “bad but big”, I have fond memories of my high-school leavers’ party, drinking RTDs in a field to No Air by Jordin Sparks and (especially regrettably) Chris Brown. And of hanging out in the DJ booth of my favourite university watering hole on the last night before it closed down, as One Direction’s What Makes You Beautiful played. As far as I remember of 2014, I heard only Iggy Azalea’s Fancy alternated with Beyoncé’s Drunk on Love for the entire year. In 2015 it was Uptown Funk. And as much as I loathe it, enough time will never pass for me to forget the Chainsmokers’ truly awful Closer, such was its omnipresence in 2016.

I’m not sure if I would have the guts to stand by any of them on Radio 4 in 15 years’ time. But when I heard Ashanti’s opening nasal refrain – they skipped “Put the fuckin’ mic on” – I was reminded of the unexpected turns life can take, how meaning can be applied only in hindsight to even the most flimsy of texts. Turns out love – or luv, as Ashanti would have it – has got everything to do with it.