Did the ‘Mad Men’ finale leave that Sonny and Cher song ringing in your head?

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Many ‘Mad Men’ fans went to sleep on Sunday night with the Sonny and Cher song ‘I Got You Babe’ buzzing through their head.

It was a puzzling earworm — what did the song’s placement at the end of the (equally puzzling) finale mean? Was it a moment of ‘60s pop innocence? A nod to a couple gesturing at the counterculture but not changing the status quo? A foreshadowing of the doomed nature of Don and Megan’s marriage (knowing of Sonny and Cher’s eventual split)? Or all of the above?

Over at Pop and Hiss, Ann Powers ponders the song, the couple and their significance. She writes, ‘As masterminded by Sonny Bono (who’d cut his teeth working with a far more tyrannical image-maker — he was known as the nice guy around Phil Spector’s studio, the one who would take the girl singers out for a burger and a break from their producer’s tirades), Sonny & Cher became the act that made marriage hip during the era of the modern institution’s first major unraveling. Cher showed young women how to assert themselves within a marriage; Sonny was the lucky dog who’d proven cool enough to score a thoroughly happening mate. Of course, while the marriage was real, what we saw and heard through the media was an act.’

Here’s Ann Powers on the song, the couple and the fantasy they represented.

— Joy Press