It’s an unlikely scenario, granted, but suppose hostile aliens landed on the front steps of the Canadian Parliament demanding to know the meaning of the word “pop” or else they reduce our cities to ashes. What do you do?

Why, you reach for “Sugar, Sugar,” of course. The ageless Archies jam is like a master class in precision popcraft jammed into just two minutes and 47 seconds: exuberantly joyful, simple but not too simple and almost debilitating in its catchiness.

If the fate of the world hinged on a quick demonstration of the essential meaning and the indefatigable power of pop music, “Sugar, Sugar” is the jam you play for the invaders. And swiftly send them back to Omicron Persei 8 with the hook lodged in their lizard brains for life, satisfied that now they’ve got it.

It will be 50 years since “Sugar, Sugar” hit No. 1 on the RPM 100 in Canada and stayed there for three weeks as of this coming Sept. 13, a half-century since it simultaneously did the same on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States and the official U.K. singles chart — for four weeks and eight weeks, respectively — as of Sept. 20.

The song, co-written by a young Canadian lad named Andy Kim and Brill Building producer/songwriter extraordinaire Jeff Barry, and first released on May 24, 1969 by the Calendar Records label, wound up becoming the No. 1 single of the year in the States, according to Billboard. In Canada, it ended up at No. 2 for 1969, just behind the Beatles’ “Get Back.” In the U.K., it ended up at No. 1, just ahead of that Beatles song.

And “Sugar, Sugar” has never gone away since. You’re hearing it in your head right now, I’d wager — “Sugar / Aaah, honey honey …” — because once you’ve heard “Sugar, Sugar” it never leaves you. It is eternal. It is pop in its purest, most universal form. Whether you’re 2 or 82, you’re stuck with it. It’s genius and maybe a little devious, too, because it wins you over even if you don’t necessarily want it to win you over.

“Once it started to have this rhythm of being on everyone’s playlist, it was there forever and people would come up to me and say, ‘If I ever hear that song again, I’m gonna f--king kill you,’” laughs Kim, an expat Montrealer who these days divides his time between Toronto and Los Angeles.

“My kid brother Michael, who worked at the Record Cave in Montreal, he told me one time, ‘Y’know, nobody ever came in on their own to buy the record for themselves.’ It would be, like, ‘Do you have that song? I need to buy it for my sister’ or ‘I need to buy it for my niece.’ It was never for you.”

More “serious” music fans might have harboured some disdain for “Sugar, Sugar” in the beginning, perhaps because it was written for a cartoon band starring in a TV show based on the eternally teenage Archie comics — a fact that led the blog This Day in Music a few years ago to term it “possibly the best bubblegum song ever, by a group who didn’t even exist.” It was briefly marketed as a 7-inch flexidisc affixed to boxes of Super Sugar Crisp cereal.

But the tune, sung with giddily youthful zeal by Ron Dante and performed by a band that included Kim and such studio-session fixtures as drummer Gary Chester, keyboardist Ron Frangipane and bassist Joe “Joey Macho” Mack, would swiftly prove its staying power above and beyond its own eternal teenhood in a slew of hit cover versions: a boyish reggae take by Bob Marley later in 1969; a languid R&B romp by Wilson Pickett that would also top the charts in 1970; a faithful reprise, albeit with leather pants and a bit more wiggle in the hips by Tom Jones later that same year; and a sweaty Ike and Tina Turner soul jam in 1977.

Kim already had a couple of hits under his belt in the form of “How’d We Ever Get This Way” and “Shoot ’Em Up, Baby” when “Sugar, Sugar” rolled around, but he maintains he’s forever “indebted” to those artists for giving him genuine credibility as “a songwriter in other people’s eyes.”

With a song, interestingly enough, that no one wanted to take seriously, nor even play, for a good nine months after its creation during a period when Woodstock, the Vietnam War, Charles Manson and the breakup of the Beatles were on everyone’s mind. At least until a single radio programmer in San Francisco put it out on the airwaves one day in the spring of 1969 and watched the telephone lines light up with requests from listeners anxious to experience its sunny disposition. Like sugar itself, after all, “Sugar, Sugar” can be rather addictive.

“It went against the grain so much that people dismissed it as a song, but people wanted to hear the song again,” says Kim, who wrote the song in about 10 minutes strumming his guitar face-to-face with Barry while his Brill Building elder and mentor fiddled around with percussion.

“And that’s the disarming thing about it: it’s not what you did, it’s the consequence of a relationship that is almost undefinable with an audience. I’m awed by it all because, the truth is, what did you actually do? D to G, to D to G. And then there’s an A there and then there’s a passing C chord — it’s just a little bit of a passing chord — so what did you accomplish in those 10 minutes? You don’t know.

“I often think that, as songwriters, we’re getting these frequencies from somewhere. It’s always an inspired thought and then you have to find out, ‘Well, how do I go from here?’ So it was really kind of a whirlwind moment. But I think the most important thing is did you feel good? Did it make you feel good? And I always loved that song. I would sing that song all the time before we even recorded it. There was something infectious about that song where I felt, ‘Oh, my god, I love this.’ But I’m as surprised as anyone by what happened.”

So what is the secret of “Sugar, Sugar”? What has taken this elevated slab of bubblegum so many places? Not only has it been to space, where it was popular cassette listening on the Apollo 12 moon mission — fittingly, Kim had spent the day before our interview in the company of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield at an event in Sarnia — but it was re-immortalized by a delusionary Homer Simpson dancing with sentient lollipops and ice-cream cones in the 1993 Simpsons episode “Boy Scoutz ‘n the Hood.” (The latter achievement, by the way, ranks in many of Kim’s friends’ eyes as “a bigger deal than Tina Turner or Bob Marley doing it or me selling 30 million records.” He recalls an excited Ron Sexsmith ringing him up the first time the episode aired and babbling, “Andy! Andy! Homer Simpson’s singing your song!”)

“It’s the rhythm of the drums, the constant shaker, the acoustic strumming, the hand claps,” opines Kevin Drew, the Broken Social Scene co-founder who produced Kim’s 2015 album It’s Decided. “It’s the simple idea of sweetness and wanting, being what intimacy is while being tricky in its hidden complexity. The arrangement is not as easy as one thinks. It stands the test of time because of its hook that stays in your brain’s humming compartment. It’s undeniable.”

Esteemed York University musicologist Rob Bowman wonders in a passing email exchange if the song’s nagging nature has something — or everything — to do with its signature conversation between the vocals and Frangipane’s two-fingered keyboard line.

“One of the keys is clearly the keyboard response to the main vocal,” he offers. “Without that, I doubt the recording/song would have endured as well as it has.”

Toronto music and culture writer Sarah Liss — a “Sugar, Sugar” devotee since she first heard Mary Lou Lord’s 1995 cover version as a teenager — appreciates the simplicity of the song’s structure and “how it does so much with so little,” but also suspects there are hidden depths in the lyric sheet as well as the arrangement.

“I loved the wistfulness of the verses, which always felt like they were tinged with more nostalgia and longing than the song itself lets on,” she says.

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“I like that it’s specific, but universal. It distils so much about infatuation and the endless potential of love into a simple sigh. I like that it takes a well-worn term of endearment and plays with the metaphor. I like the way Andy Kim teases out those tendrils of doubt that poke through even the most blissed-out honeymoon-stage psyche. And I like that, if you choose to ignore the clouds around the periphery, the tune is the sunniest, most effervescent crush anthem.”

For Kim, “Sugar, Sugar” — along with, but to a much greater degree than “Rock Me Gently” and the rest of his hits — has been the endlessly lucrative key to “an incredible, sustaining lifestyle” for 50 years now. He could likely have retired on it and never written another tune. He still doesn’t know where it came from, refusing to “take a bow for an inspiration,” and defers so Paul McCartney on the matter of songwriting: “I don’t know. It’s magic.”

“You’re just doing something and suddenly people want to know why …Here’s basically the process: you’re in an environment of your own world and then an idea comes, and when the idea comes you try to fit it into something and if you think about it long enough, it’s gonna escape … After you make the record, it’s in the hands of the gods.

“But ‘Sugar, Sugar’? It’s this magical song that brings happiness, love and dance. It’s pure in some way.”