'A Beautiful Mine,' by RJD2

It's a 'Volare' kind of world, the libertine yet weirdly repressed early-1960s ad agency in the critical hit show 'Mad Men,' back for its second season. Rampant smoking, shtupping and three-martini lunches make it abundantly clear we're being ushered into an entirely different era. Yet 'A Beautiful Mine,' the beats-and-strings RJD2 snippet that accompanies the show's opening title sequence, roots us squarely in the present day, when all that suppressed psychological baggage can be viewed through our latter-day dysfunctionality X-ray machines.

If the despondent strings sampled on the turntablist's instrumental version of the track (the vocal version features Aceyalone) telegraph the show's underlying angst, the busy funky drumming that props them up gets the heart pumping for some good old-fashioned voyeurism. The cut appears on the 'Mad Men' soundtrack, alongside Julie London, Ella Fitzgerald and Vic Damone's 'On the Street Where You Live,' which would stack together nicely on the archaic kind of turntable. Read TV Tattler's interview with Jon Hamm.

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